LINCOLN PORTRAYS A HUMBLE SAINT
Filmviewers may be familiar with Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940), directed by John Cromwell, especially Raymond Massey’s stirring performance. Or perhaps Massey’s role as Lincoln in television films. Amazingly, no director ever dared challenge Massey’s interpretation until director Steven Spielberg released Lincoln just before Thanksgiving 2012. What changed is that the book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (2005) by Doris Kearns Goodwin reveals so many iconoclastic facts and insights. Daniel Day Lewis’s Lincoln is humble, almost inaudibly softspoken, yet clever, erudite, persuasive, and very wise. Whereas Johnny Carson failed to crack a single joke about Lincoln, the film features Lincoln recounting a story or two that will make theaters roar with laughter. Rather than featuring the beginning of Lincoln’s career in Illinois, Spielberg focuses mostly on the year 1865, which chronologically ends but does not linger on the day April 15. The context is that Lincoln was reelected for a second term in 1864, the war is still on with a Union victory seemingly inevitable, and a lame duck Congress is considering a vote on the 13th Amendment to abolish slavery. The Senate has already adopted the amendment, so all that is needed is a 2/3 vote in the House of Representatives. Thaddeus Stevens (played by Tommy Lee Jones), whose wife for 23 years is quadroon housekeeper Lydia (played by S. Epatha Merkerson), has been waiting 30 years for this vote, but those committed to support the amendment are a few dozen votes shy of the 2/3 vote because both Democrats and conservative Republicans are opposed. But Southern leaders are now ready to talk peace. Should Lincoln push for adoption of the amendment before or after peace? How should he get the necessary votes that he wants so badly? The carefully crafted drama features period costumes and makeup, a rowdy Congress, assertive politicians played by a host of character actors, a very emotional Mary Todd Lincoln (played by Sally Field), and visits to the hospital and front lines. Phlegmatic while those with contrary views spout nonsense, Lincoln prefers to recite parables to make his case with recalcitrant politicians until in desperation he finally pounds his desk and threatens a few whose votes he needs desperately by uncharacteristically noting how powerful he is as president. The authenticity of Lincoln, in other words, elevates the 16th president even higher on a pedestal than he ever would have wanted to be placed. MH
GENERATION P REVEALS THE FIRST DECADE OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION
When Generation P begins, Russians are content taking sunbaths at a seaside resort. Everyone is secure with a job and a residence. Then Boris Yeltsin pulls Russia out of the Soviet Union. Economic and social chaos follow. The hero of the film, Babylen Tatarsky (played by Vladimir Epifantsev), finds employment selling cigarettes and snacks until his friend Leonid (played by Mikhail Efremov) introduces him to the world of commercial advertising. New products from the West are entering the Russian market, but the Russians know little of their charm unless advertising gimmicks introduce them to the public. Amid a plot that resembles Wall Street (1987), filmviewers learn that gangsters, on the margin in the later years of the USSR, are now dominant in the “free” market. A gap between rich and poor widens, with the clever on top, but not for long. The cynical point of the film emerges within the first hour of the film but is overembellished thereafter as Tatarsky descends into drugs and fantasy. Directed by Victor Ginzberg and based on the novel by Victor Pelevin, Generation P clearly explains why Russians value the stability of the Putin era. MH