Lincoln

Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln" is one of those films that, on paper, should be a slog — a two-and-a-half hour drama about political wrangling in the 1860s sounds like the cinematic equivalent of a dry textbook. But this isn’t your high school history class. Spielberg leans hard into the chaos and compromise that actually defined the passing of the Thirteenth Amendment. He wisely shrinks the timeline to focus on the last few months of Abraham Lincoln’s life, which makes the story feel surprisingly tense and relevant.

Daniel Day-Lewis's performance as Lincoln is honestly a clinic on how to embody a historical figure without lapsing into parody. Right from his first scene, he’s not just doing an imitation of Lincoln — he’s inhabiting a complicated, wry man who is both weary and determined. You feel the physical and emotional exhaustion in his hunched shoulders and cautious speech. It’s a performance that carries the whole movie, and every moment feels carefully calibrated.

The supporting cast is stacked and brings some much-needed energy to a film that could have felt too solemn. Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln is genuinely heartbreaking at times, especially in a scene where she calls out her husband for his emotional distance. David Strathairn plays William Seward with just the right mix of loyalty and exasperation. But the real scene-stealer is Tommy Lee Jones as the cantankerous Thaddeus Stevens. His scenes actually snap with wit, sarcasm, and frustration.

"Lincoln" really shines in the way it doesn’t sugarcoat the messy, unglamorous nature of politics. You get a sense of how ugly and manipulative those backroom deals were — and Spielberg doesn’t shy away from showing both compromise and hypocrisy. For example, the deliberate ambiguity about what constitutes "equality" for different factions exposes the squirmy moral underbelly of even the most celebrated historical moments.

If there’s a flaw, it’s that the pacing drags in the middle act. The movie gets bogged down in endless congressional debates and procedural discussions. Some of these scenes are fascinating in how they subvert traditional “great man” storytelling, but others feel repetitive. I caught myself glancing at the time once or twice, wondering if we really needed this much footage of James Spader bribing people in dimly lit rooms.

Visually, the film is quietly beautiful. Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kamiński fill everything with overcast light, soft shadows, and candlelit interiors. There’s a tactile sense to the production design, especially the cluttered war rooms and crowded House floor. The muted color palette keeps things somber but never dreary. It fits — this is not a rousing, flag-waving history lesson but a story about personal and political grit.

The emotional beats hit harder than you might expect from a movie that spends so much time discussing legal language. There’s a moment when Day-Lewis’s Lincoln contemplates the real human cost of the conflict, and it’s not showy or melodramatic — just deeply human. John Williams’s score avoids his usual bombast and instead adds a gentle undercurrent, which stops the movie from being too sentimental.

In the end, "Lincoln" is more about the process of change than the heroes behind it. It’s not pretending that the right thing “just happens”; it’s about how the right thing almost didn’t happen at all. This focus on moral negotiation gives the film its lingering power. It’s heavy, sometimes dense, but deeply rewarding if you stick with it. I left the theater actually thinking about how those long-forgotten political battles still echo in today's world.