I feel like we spent a good part of the weekend in the 19th century. No, the power didn’t go out. We went to two long movies, one set in 1864-1865 and the other between 1815 and 1832.
We saw Lincoln on Saturday evening. Only one of the roughly 25 screens in our community still has it running. We arrived before the theater was cleaned, so we joined a queue of about six people waiting to gain admission. Another couple came up behind us. I heard him say, “I thought we were the only people around here who hadn’t seen it yet.”
The theater filled up slowly over the next hour, but it did fill up, completely. By the time the lights went down, people were asking seated patrons to shift over so they could turn two free single seats into a pair of adjacent ones.
I had a rough idea of what the movie was going to be about. It started with Lincoln’s re-election to his second term. He was riding high, having already signed the Emancipation Proclamation, though the Civil War was still being waged. His advisers told him he could probably accomplish anything he set his mind to. He felt that his best, and perhaps only, chance to get the 13th Amendment passed through the House of Representatives was before the war ended. It had already been passed by the Senate and it needed a 2/3 majority to be adopted by the representatives. The Republicans had won big in the election, but they still needed support from roughly 20 Democrats, many of whom strongly opposed the amendment because they thought it might lead to the vote for blacks and (gasp!) even women.
Though set against the backdrop of the war, which is demonstrated in a violent opening scene and then left in the background for most of the rest of the movie, Lincoln is sort of a courtroom procedural. It shows how Lincoln and his supporters gained the votes they needed by just about any means necessary, while playing “hide the negotiators” to keep the war from ending prematurely.
Daniel Day Lewis is perfect as Lincoln. He’s a big name actor, but he’s not a “big face” actor. I wouldn’t recognize him out of context., so you could be totally immersed in his character and not once think of the actor playing the president. There are a lot of other recognizable actors, including Sally Field as Lincoln’s wife, David Strathairn as his minister of state, Hal Holbrook as a powerful (but recently deposed) member of the Republican party, Tommy Lee Jones as a very vocal abolitionist who sometimes let his passion carry him away. James Spader was excellent as one of a trio of rascals hired to negotiate behind-the-scenes deals with reluctant Democrats. Walton Goggins played against type as a wide-eyed and somewhat cowardly congressman from Kentucky. David Costabile played the bill’s sponsor. For most of the actors, I found myself thinking: There’s Tommy Lee Jones. It’s Boyd Crowder from Justified and Gale Boetticher from Breaking Bad. But Daniel Day Lewis was Lincoln, a thoughtful, introspective man who reminded me of a cross between Mark Twain and my doctoral adviser, both of whom liked to tell entertaining stories.
It’s a very good movie. I didn’t find that it dragged at all and they did a difficult thing in making something where we already know the outcome suspenseful. I loved the dialog, especially Lincoln’s story about Ethan Allen in England and the bickering in Congress.
Yesterday we saw Les Misérables. I saw the stage musical when it came to Houston sometime in the early 1990s, and I’ve read Victor Hugo’s novel, so this time I knew what to expect. I had forgotten, though, that absolutely everything is sung—that there is no spoken dialog. Somehow that seems more acceptable on the stage than on the big screen. A lot of people took Russel Crowe to task for his singing, but I found it okay. Anne Hatheway’s showstopper was amazing, and much of it appears to have been from a single take. Either that or it was very carefully stitched together. I found Eponine’s swan song to be particularly sad, but given the story’s title, you can’t go in expecting good times and happy endings. The little boy who played Gavroche was a cutie, but I wonder why everyone spoke with a British—even Cockney—accent (except Thénardier). Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter provided comic relief in well orchestrated scenes of pick-pocketry. Hugh Jackman was virtually unrecognizable in the impressive opening scene where a bunch of soldiers drag an immense ship into dry dock. I’ve never toured des egouts in Paris, but after seeing Jean Valjean dragging Marius through them, I’m not inclined to do so! Amanda Seyfried was fine in essentially a thankless part. She didn’t really have a personality, but that’s the way it was written. I did find this film to be long (seven minutes longer than Lincoln), especially the “denouement” after the final barricade confrontation, but I enjoyed it for the most part. There was one sound effect that was particularly effective, I thought. (The theater, the only one still running the movie, was also packed.)
Returned to the 21st century this morning, when I watched The Mentalist. An odd episode. Too many suspects and the identity of the killer seemed rather arbitrary. It could really have been anyone and it wouldn’t have mattered one way or the other. All this to introduce the idea that Red John was a member of the cult that has been part of the story for a while, and the suspicion that the former CBI guy could be Red John. I wonder how long they’re going to string the RJ story out. Is there a story after Red John is brought to justice or otherwise identified? It’s a tricky matter, I expect.
