Thinkin' about Lincoln

Historical genre . . . or historical "genre" . . . . where is the cultural energy these days?

I've been thinking for some time about Steven Spielberg's Lincoln - without coming to any clear conclusions regarding it.  Perhaps because there is no clear conclusion to come to regarding it.

Well, actually, there was one conclusion I came to - I wish I'd liked the movie more; for me, it amounted to a literate, but fussily damp, cinematic squib.

Without a doubt, though, it is a fine, high-minded piece of craftsmanship.  It boasts a script, by Tony Kushner, that occasionally hints at the political eloquence he's known for.  And it showcases a central performance, by Daniel Day-Lewis, that in technical terms accomplishes something uncanny: like the robot Lincoln at Disney World, it conjures a weirdly "accurate" fantasy-recollection of a man whom no one alive has ever seen or heard.  Watching Day-Lewis, the audience all but nods, "Yes - that must be what he was like."  It's an odd kind of achievement, surely - the impersonation of a collective impression rather than an actual man; and yet it works cinematically, at least on the surface.

Beneath that surface, though - ah, there's the rub; Day-Lewis remains a folksy, flinty cipher to the finish, for all his wry grinning and quotes from Shakespeare.  And to be fair - maybe the actual Abe Lincoln was a cipher, too.  But movies used to be able to tell us more than that about their mysterious heroes; T.E. Lawrence was his own kind of sphinx, for instance, but David Lean and Robert Bolt limned his charismatic essence with far more power than Spielberg and Kushner manage here.

Okay, Lawrence of Arabia is a pretty high bar - and to be fair, Spielberg and Kushner were apparently working from a celebrated text, Team of Rivals, by famous plagiarist Doris Kearns Goodwin, who is nobody's idea of a literary stylist. Goodwin's writing (if it is her writing) often plods with calm authority from one cliché to the next (so unsurprisingly, she's fond of chapter titles like "The Gathering Storm," etc.).  And her ideas, at least the animating ideas of Team of Rivals, often feel like the same kind of lesson-plan boilerplate: there is an objective, with which we can all agree, and which the Great Man in question brings about through clever gamesmanship on a political chessboard that is constantly in flux.  Ta-da! That's history, folks.

An uncanny robot inhabited by the ghost of Atticus Finch.

Thank God Tony Kushner is a lot smarter than that, but throughout Lincoln Goodwin's concept drags on him like some pseudo-intellectual anchor. Kushner's at his best in pitched dialectical battles between characters (like Belize and Roy Cohn in Angels in America) whose very lives are antitheses, and who therefore operate as what Hegel might have called "history personified."  But Team of Rivals offers no such foil to Lincoln (and let's be honest, any such conceptual depth is a bit beyond both Goodwin and Spielberg) - so Kushner's hands are kept from the trusty dramatic tools which might have helped him limn his hero's strange depths (I mean even Peter O'Toole had Omar Sharif, know what I'm sayin'?).

And thus Lincoln feels weirdly flat despite its high period detail, and its lead character - well, as I watched Day-Lewis, I was reminded of Kushner's own words from Angels: we probably cannot make the crossing that Lincoln made, for such great voyages in this world do not any more exist.  But what a grand goal even attempting such a voyage would have been!  The trouble is that such a goal would have immensely complicated the Hollywood audience's relationship to "No. 16." In particular, it would have meant lifting the veil on his own curious (if admittedly "enlightened," and always evolving) brand of racial politics.  We would have had to ponder how someone could move from something like a separate-but-equal racial stance, and a deep reluctance to endanger the Union by declaring slaves free, to the final realization that only that very freedom could validate the sacrifices of the war, and even weld the Union together for good.

In other words, we would have had to experience a dialectic.

Maybe that's what bugs me most about Lincoln - they hired the right playwright for the job, but then wouldn't let him write his play!  At least Kushner comes through with a far more sophisticated and successful script here than he did with Munich (his last effort with Spielberg); this time there's something close to an actual rhythm to many scenes, and there's a sprinkling of genuinely funny jokes.

So Spielberg doesn't quite manage to scramble things as he has before; he just manages to prevent them from coalescing into anything really insightful or new.  Thus the surface of Daniel Day-Lewis's performance may be striking, but its mold is almost too familiar: inside the Hall of Presidents, we find Atticus Finch all over again.  And while Day-Lewis is surrounded by a gallery of fine actors, many of whom (particularly James Spader and Joseph Gordon-Levitt) hold their own against him - even in the funerary feathers of the period - they, too, are all playing familiar types.  Actually, sometimes they're just blanks, like Sally Fields' curious take on Mary Todd Lincoln; we never quite understand what she's doing in the movie, because Kushner isn't given the space to accurately chart a central moral paradox about his hero, who was willing to risk other men's lives to save the Union and free the slaves - but not his own son's.

So my attention drifted during the film's longeurs, and I found myself re-considering the paradox of Spielberg's later career, and his self-thwarted attempts to revive the mojo of such legends of popular cinema as David Lean and Stanley Kubrick.  Those auteurs were able to cross high and low with astonishing skill - while Spielberg (let's be honest) keeps flubbing it despite the best of intentions.  He seems to understand "high," but it's just not in his bones; he's basically low, through and through.  He's more at home in pure genre (science fiction in particular) than he is in what used to be called "the historical genre."

Of course to be fair to Spielberg, "low" keeps getting lower and lower.  Indeed, we've already seen Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (poster at top), which posited the sixteenth president as a hatchet-wielding slayer of blood-suckers; and Quentin Tarantino, who concocted a Jewish revenge fantasy out of World War II (in Inglorious Basterds), is about to turn the same trick with a cinematic money shot for African-Americans in Django Unchained.  Yes, pop has once more found the Civil War, and the results are almost as dismaying as Gone with the Wind; left to its own devices, "genre" will only distort the conflict's meaning and twist it to predictable uses (generally, adolescent revenge).  Lincoln stands as a kind of valiant attempt at a riposte to all that - it's the sort of movie we know we all need, a movie that might tempt the culture back from the millennial cliff.

And we'd get that kind of movie, too, if David Lean were still around.

Only he's not.

Lincoln leaves Lincoln a cipher to the finish.

Watching the reruns on That 70's Show

Politically and culturally, ours is a backward-looking nation. In our politics, we endlessly battle over the legacy of the 60's, and much of our pop culture still takes its cues from the 70's (not coincidentally, the era in which the mutual co-optation of our political cultures first took form). That observation goes double for the movies - the tail end of the 70's (and the cusp of the 80's) was the period in which the blockbuster and the video game emerged, cable TV first splintered the national audience, and the comic book was posited as a format for A-list production.  Those tropes and issues have been working and re-working their way through the multiplex ever since.

What's most fascinating about these developments, however, is that they seemed to nip the last great flowering of American film in the bud. Indeed, by the mid-80's it was clear the movies had taken a nose-dive in quality - a collapse from which they've never fully recovered. One by one the old arthouse masters fell silent (Bergman bade farewell to film, Fellini foundered), while the mainstream auteurs, the ones who hoped to yoke high and low together onscreen, were heard from less and less (Hitchcock and Lean died, Kubrick's output dwindled).

What was more surprising was that all the young turks who had dominated the American screen in the 70's suddenly hit a wall; Coppola never recovered from the debacle of One from the Heart (1982); Spielberg repeated himself or groped for a vision after E.T. (also 1982); Polanski remained in exile; Woody Allen began his long decline; Lucas openly declared himself the effects engineer he had always been.  The slide didn't feel like a crash because there were still pop pleasures to be had (Aliens, Back to the Future) - and quirky new talents did appear (Terry Gilliam, Steven Soderbergh, Tim Burton, the Coens).  But slowly it sank in that none of this latest generation of filmmakers was able to scale the heights of their predecessors - much less carve out movies that could transform the culture.

Why that should have proved true is the kind of question that, if film criticism were a science rather than a degraded form of cheap rhetoric, it might be equipped to answer.  Certainly Reagan's reactionary 40's mentality (so oddly mimicking the 40's pop-surround of Star Wars) had something to do with it; politically, America was in a retrenchment (from which, again, it has never fully recovered, and which may destroy the nation yet).  And as noted before, technology continued to crib on the cultural space of the movies, and further fragment a diminishing audience, while general cultural literacy (necessary for any serious art form) continued its steady descent. And the business codes of the industry evolved from skepticism to something like hostility toward individual vision.  In this regard the annual slate of Oscar nominations operates as a sad palimpsest: in 1975, the nominees for best picture were One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Barry Lyndon, Jaws, Dog Day Afternoon, and Nashville; in 1988, the nominees were Rain Man, Working Girl, Dangerous Liaisons, Mississippi Burning, and The Accidental Tourist. Other years, Out of Africa and Driving Miss Daisy actually won the trophy.  Sigh.

Cross this with The Goonies and you have what Super 8 hoped to be.

These thoughts came to mind (again) as I sat through two recent movies that both felt like repeats of that 70's show: J.J. Abrams's Super 8, a Spielberg homage produced by the master himself, and Terrence Malick's big, beautiful new bore, The Tree of Life.  Both were striking in their devotion to the zeitgeist of that benighted decade (in one case, the director borrowed from himself), but both attempts at cultural ventriloquism - or should I say turning back the clock? - essentially failed.  And as I watched them, I sensed a drifting pop establishment once again attempting to re-connect with its roots, but failing to do so.  Which again, made me heave a heavy sigh.

But I couldn't help but notice what was missing in each case - in Super 8, it was particularly obvious (and thus had its own kind of added poignance).  I admit that J. J. Abrams is brilliant at triangulated audience-development strategies - he got people to buy into the ever-sillier elaborations of Lost, and then his empty "re-boot" of the Star Trek series, too.  But you could never pretend to yourself, while you're sitting in front of the screen during one of his pictures, that Abrams has any real talent as a filmmaker.  Where he places his camera, how he structures his sequences, how his themes develop - all this feels either borrowed or banal (his one talent is for casting). And so it seems to me Abrams shouldn't set himself up before the example of Spielberg - a natural with the camera if ever there was one, who even in his lesser films will startle you with a scene that in purely cinematic terms is so inspired it's close to perfection.

And there are a lot of sequences like that in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (complete movie above), which, if you combined its spookier sequences with the Goonies (and added a few jolts from Jaws and other Spielberg flicks), appears to have served as the template for Super 8.  Don't get me wrong - I think Close Encounters is at times a bit flaccid in its uplift - Spielberg was never a screenwriter - and it's probably ground zero for what a friend of mine snarkily calls "The Spielberg Facial," in which a character - and sometimes character after character - stares in awe at the approaching shark/spaceship/dinosaur as the director zooms in for the money shot.  But I have to admit that many of the sequences in CE3K are nonetheless unforgettable, even if they depend on the Spielberg Facial; editing, imagery, action and, of course, music (by the amazingly versatile John Williams) cohere into scenes that still look, well, awesome.  Indeed, just about every appearance of the alien craft in CE3K is the kind of cinematic tour de force that George Lucas could only dream of.  Spielberg just had it goin' on.

But J.J. Abrams doesn't.  He couldn't orchestrate a scene if his life depended on it.  Half of Close Encounters was burned into my memory back when I first saw it in 1977 (I even remember the theatre I saw it in, which you usually do when the picture is a great one).  Meanwhile, only a week has passed since I caught Super 8, but already I can hardly remember anything about it.  The young actors were subtle and affecting, I remember that; the special effects were certainly convincing (but they always are, these days; special effects are the one thing Hollywood can still do).  The conceit of the movie -that Abrams's nouveau-Goonies were making a Romero-style zombie film - was hilariously realized over the final credits.  And the period - actually, the year, 1979 (you can pinpoint it) - was invoked almost as a fetish. from the pop songs on the radio (My Sharona, Heart of Glass) to the introduction of the Walkman to the faint yellow stains carefully painted onto the stars' capped teeth.

But for all that, the fraying, frazzled sunniness of the decade - the loose, cynically genial attitude that Spielberg conjured effortlessly in Close Encounters - somehow never came over; a blandly ironic millennial self-consciousness was always just being held at bay.  And the film's plot, like its tone, refused to cohere - indeed, the fact that the kids had accidentally photographed the monster terrorizing their scrappy little town eventually felt like an afterthought in a movie that seemed to be running on several separate tracks at once.  By the finish, Abrams had begun jumping from one digital setpiece to another with predictable crudeness, and more and more scenes felt like half-hearted glosses on Spielberg's early hits.  Most critics have praised the film for being better than  Thor and The Green Lantern - which I'm sure it is.  But it's still mired in its own under-achieving period - i.e., the millennium - so why pay to see it when the real thing is available on YouTube for free?  I'm afraid the ultimate message of Super 8 is a dispiriting reminder to America that you can't go home to the multiplex anymore.


An inside look at how Malick created the exquisite look of his 70's masterpiece, Days of Heaven.

Somehow, though, Terrence Malick didn't get that memo. He literally tries to go home in The Tree of Life - and not only to his childhood home in Texas, but all the way back to everybody's home, the primordial soup of the cosmos. I'm not kidding; after a brief introduction to his characters - a 50's family much like the director's own - this Rhodes scholar backs up the way James Michener used to in blockbusters like Hawaii to tell his tale from the very beginning: we stare in ravished disbelief as galaxies form, and amino acids coalesce into proteins, and eventually dinosaurs rule the earth (albeit with curiously soulful attitude).

The only director who has ever brought this kind of thing off, of course, is Kubrick (in 2001:A Space Odyssey, produced just before the high tide of American cinema). But much as J. J. Abrams is no Spielberg, Malick is no Kubrick; while 2001 opens with a stunningly photographed prehistoric drama which poetically compresses every theme in the ensuing film, Malick's "fantasia" (yes, I also couldn't help but recall that corny Disney visualization of Rite of Spring) is merely stunningly photographed (ironically enough, it was photographed by Douglas Trumbull, one of Kubrick's special effects men on 2001).

But then almost everything in The Tree of Life is merely stunningly photographed - it's basically a catalogue of Malick's familiar concerns, stripped down to their imagistic essence. I suppose the director's central theme is evanescence, so the arc of his career makes its own kind of stylistic sense; whereas in his early, great films (Badlands, Days of Heaven), Malick at least lightly tethered his haunting imagery to sturdy plotlines, in his later, more self-indulgent work he has begun to skimp on that boring story-structure stuff, the better to riff on his addiction to luminism. In short, this self-serious director was always episodic; now - despite pretending he's telling a story so big it has to start with the Big Bang - he's purely impressionistic. Indeed, sometimes his movie boils down to simplistic existential questions literally whispered over the pretty pictures.

Although don't get me wrong - those pretty pictures can be pretty seductive; indeed, the luminousness never stops in The Tree of Life; Malick seems to be able to find it anywhere. Whereas the famously ravishing Days of Heaven depended on what photographers call "the magic hour" for its haunted look, Malick now seems to be able to tease a delicately soulful glow from any time of day. And to be fair, there are moments of wide-eyed wonder here that capture precisely what it's like to see the world as a child does (that is, as mysteriously new), as well as several inspired images - like the moment in which sunlight flickers on a wall like an errant soul - that can stand up to anything in this director's earlier achievement.

It's always the magic hour in The Tree of Life.

Which makes sense, as the embedment of the spiritual in the physical is one of this director's conceptual hobbyhorses, and in Tree of Life it's more apparent than ever that there's a streak of Melville in Malick - he shares the great novelist's spiritual homo-eroticism (as do many, if not most, heterosexual men - they're all in love with innocent guy-ness). Thus there's a curiously obsessive undertow to Malick's adoration of the crewcut boys who figure as his heroes (and who struggle, in predictable fashion, with their thorny but loving father, played by Brad Pitt); they're not only freshly minted Holden Caulfield clones but also little Billy Budds running innocently around their tiny town (one of them, we know, will die at the end of adolescence). But again, to be fair, there's a clear-eyed awareness at work, here, too - Malick's boys (one of whom is a dead ringer for Pitt) break windows and gleefully strap helpless frogs to fireworks, just the way real boys do. Indeed, Tree of Life is most affecting when it dances along the line between Buddhist reverie and an acquiescence of the hard truths of human nature.

Still, we slowly zone out on all the zen, and Malick doesn't even attempt the development of the kind of climax that Melville always relied on. The movie begins to feel less and less, rather than more and more, coherent, as Malick starts hopping back and forth between his boys' childhood and adulthood - and by the time a strange kind of Rapture (we saw Mom floating around earlier) has begun to take place at some heavenly beach, we find ourselves patting back a smile rather than tearing up. (Needless to say, the picture closes with ANOTHER galaxy forming - the cycle begins again, Little Grasshopper!)  We also begin to sense an off-putting self-absorption operating beneath Malick's twilit Eden; he and Pitt, for instance, can't really make their iconically prickly father figure come alive - and Sean Penn, who plays one of the boys all grown up, just looks lost; all the auto-erotic innocence apparently precludes any messy adult complexity.

Thus we're left feeling that we're watching a different kind of reminiscence - one for a time in which Terrence Malick could actually pull his philosophical visions off. It's fairly apparent that The Tree of Life only got made because of the participation of Pitt and Penn; interesting movies are only made by studios these days because of pressure from actors (not the audience). And like many stars, these two are no doubt nostalgic for the old mojo of American film - when they could be confident, at least now and then, that they were devoting themselves to art, not commerce; and Malick is one of that tradition's last living auteurs. Only his highbrow well seems as dry as Spielberg's middlebrow one - indeed, one thing we wonder while we're watching the wondrous imagery of The Tree of Life is why the movie exists at all; in some deep way, it feels oddly superfluous. Tellingly, when Robert DeNiro tried to explain why he had voted to give it the Palme d'Or at Cannes, the actor stammered that "It had the size, the importance, the intention, whatever you want to call it, that seemed to fit the prize." Okay.  Note he didn't mention the "artistic success." But I doubt we'd have to go back to the dawn of time to explain that ellipsis; we'd probably only have to go back to 1973.

War Horse, Spielberg, and the wooden O

War Horse (above, a promotional clip that gives some sense of the power of its puppetry) is scheduled for March 2011 on Broadway - and I anticipate a response like the mobbed performances us old-timers remember from the tour of Nicholas Nickleby some twenty-five years ago. The arrival of the National Theatre blockbuster, followed by the much-anticipated residency of the Royal Shakespeare Company later that summer, will no doubt revive the persistent sense that American theatre lags behind its British cousin - indeed, the fact that the RSC is building a facsimile of its own digs in the Park Avenue Armory (below) only reinforces this impression with an added, subliminal message, "Not only do we have to show you Yanks how it's done, but we have to bring our own theatre to do it."



And let's be honest: there's a great deal of truth behind that impression; I admit I haven't seen anything on the American stage for several years that equals the eloquent power of War Horse. No new musical has come close, and even the considerable firepower of August: Osage County seems to flicker in comparison. War Horse isn't perfect - its second half drags a bit, due to a lengthy extension of its pacifist metaphor; but for all of its first half - and of course for its finale - it's just about peerless.

But precisely what is it peerless at? you may ask - Isn't it really just a children's story, a kind of inflated version of "Lassie Come Home"? And what does it have to tell us - that war is horrible? I think we already know that!

These points are well taken, of course; there's little that's thematically novel or striking in War Horse. What is unforgettable about it is not its message but the means of its artistry, and how those means are linked to the primal basis of theatre. To revive a much-repeated phrase, in War Horse, the medium is the message. Its meaning is embedded in its presentation on the stage.



To understand why this is so, ponder (for a moment) the fact that upon seeing the production, Steven Spielberg immediately optioned the book for the silver screen - in fact he's shooting his version right now, on location outside Devon, England (left). But of course he's using real horses, and real soldiers, for what sounds like an equine version of Saving Private Ryan (for his script, he ditched the stage adaptor for the screenwriters of Love, Actually and Billy Elliot). I heard quite a few people discussing the film in the West End theatre where I saw War Horse; they all agreed it simply wouldn't be the same thing as the unforgettable stage version we'd just witnessed.

But what precisely would be missing? For make no mistake, the Spielberg War Horse will be a masterful tearjerker. It will also no doubt be spectacular; I'm sure no expense will be spared in the reconstruction of the No Man's Land between the British and German trenches of World War I, in which the eponymous "war horse," Joey, almost meets his doom. The story will be "brought to life" in a way that will be utterly convincing in every detail. And yet when fans of the theatre piece think of the pushy, obvious sentiment and grandiose illusionism Spielberg is known for, they almost reflexively curl their lips.

Part of this reaction, of course, is testament to the power of understatement - for the National Theatre's War Horse is careful (at least until its finale) to avoid milking its material. The production is intentionally rough around the edges, the characters hard, and hardly lovable - and the bond between boy and horse that is the spine of the play takes its time to develop, and so is all the more believable once it has developed.

All that, of course, may not be evidence of actual artistic virtue but rather a form of canny commercial sophistication, of a type Mr. Spielberg doesn't, and perhaps cannot, share; I'd wager the makers of War Horse knew quite well that sentiment is most savory when it's hard-won. I can only say - give me that kind of commercial sophistication over Spielberg's phony dreamland any day.

No, wait - I can say more (of course). What kept coming back to me during War Horse was the fact that its horse-puppets (designed by South Africa's Handspring Puppet Company), though utterly convincing in their incredibly detailed motion, were nevertheless always and obviously puppets - you could see right through their transparent skins, in fact, to the men nestled inside, pulling every lever and turning every gear, and bracing for the moment when some actor or other would leap onto their shoulders for a ride. The "horses" existed in two perceptive "valences," if you will - one as machine, and another as living, breathing - yet imaginary - being.

The same dichotomy prevailed throughout the scenery-free production (the motif of which was rough sketches done by the young hero), although in its circular playing space - its postmodern "wooden O" - War Horse powerfully evoked the vasty fields of France (and England) just as Shakespeare did in Henry V. Indeed, in the famous prologue to that play, the Bard put his finger on the artistic crux of the theatre - "Let us," the Chorus pleads, "ciphers to this great accompt / on your imaginary forces work."

Ah, our imaginary forces - how much more powerful imagination can be than mere illusion! And how powerful, and mysteriously rich, are the sensory experiences we summon from within ourselves! Evocation is so much more potent than illusion, in fact, that the theatre need make no apology for its supposed paucity before the blandishments of cinema. I can believe that Spielberg's War Horse will be shattering, and stunning, and all those other things movies have wanted to be since cinematic history began. But will it stir our imaginations? Somehow I doubt it, because film, at least these days, inevitably strives to impress rather than evoke.

And the engagement of imagination is what theatre will always have "over" the silver screen. Which isn't to say movies can never manage the same trick - but it takes a lot; the movie screen is famously "flat" unless it's goosed along with music, effects, and superb editing and camera placement; unless a director can induce a kind of dream-state in the audience, his film will be stillborn. Oddly enough, truly evocative magic is often conjured in film by simulating the conventions of the theatre - think of Citizen Kane with its deep-focus, stage-like spaces in which the Mercury Theatre actors move; even the jumps between close-up and panorama which we think of as essentially cinematic are actually perceptual outgrowths of Shakespeare's fluid shifts from pageant to soliloquy to aside. (Intriguingly, when War Horse wants to tamp down its evocative wattage, and simply impress us with its carnage, it resorts to slow-motion "cinematic" sequences.)

But why is film so flat-footed next to theatre? Oddly, it may have something to do with the fact that in theatre, the mechanical apparatus - the valence of "actuality" - is always obvious. You can see the strings on the puppets, and the men inside the horse - we are aware of the live presence of the magician, and our connection to him. In movies, by way of contrast, the strings are hidden, and the illusion complete - but this makes the illusion impenetrable, and unengaging; in effect, we have to be lulled to a kind of perceptual sleep to be moved by it, to "accept" its fantasy as our own. But in theatre, we can remain wide awake while dreaming, and that fact makes theatre incredibly freeing, and thrilling, when done right - and it can be done right with unbelievably simple means.

The resulting effects, however, are anything but simple; they can include so much more than cinema can achieve. An electrifying scene in War Horse, for example, is the one in which the young lad Albert finally teaches the growing Joey to accept a rider; the sequence wraps with a wild gallop on horseback - something that you'd think is "beyond" the capability of the theatre to evoke. Yet in War Horse, the audience experienced not only the thrill of forward motion - a staple of the cinema, from The Great Train Robbery to Avatar - but also so much more: we felt the rush of the wind, and the surge of the horse's body, even the pounding of our own lungs. And that's because we weren't dreaming - we were living.