Mid Winter Movies

Let’s take a quick, mid winter trip to the movies.  Here’s my next offering:

11.     Lincoln

22.     Lincoln

33.   Lincoln

44.    Lincoln

55.    Lincoln

This one is a treasure, but admittedly, I’m hooked on good historical movies (even though most of them would make a true historian cringe).  Don’t bring your fact checker to these, just enjoy the great story they tell.  Although for this one, the history is pretty spot on.  Day-Lewis is remarkable, he actually becomes Lincoln...mannerisms, speech patterns, even his gait is just so accurate. The scene of Lincoln walking out of the White House at movie end is wrenching beyond description.  You just want to scream at him to stop, please stop!

I’m in one of my life phases where the Civil War is a favorite topic.  An outgrowth of that is a newly found interest in our 16^th President.  For years, I have avoided the Civil War (and Lincoln) simply because there are more books on the shelves about them than there are about Jesus. With life so short, why even start to read them?  To do the subject justice, I would have to spend my entire life reading nothing else. 

But thanks to a friend of mine who is a Civil War fanatic (every year, he and his wife vacation at a Civil War battlefield or historical sight – he has even done the “ghost” tour at Gettysburg), I was shown a short cut path that provided me a thorough overview of the subject that sparked interest in offshoot topics that I could then explore if I desired.   One such road led to Lincoln. 

I finished “Team of Rivals” a short while ago, and the movie is based on just a part of this impressive writing.  In the book, William H. Seward (Lincoln’s Secty. of State) plays a vital role in his Presidency, and in the saving of the country.  Of course I knew that his home/museum was right next door in Auburn, NY. And in all these years, I never gave one thought to visiting there.  Well, that’s changed!  A spring visit is in order, and a quick ride down to the Aurora Inn for lunch will make the day.

If you have a good memory, you will note that another of my favorite movies is “Amistad” (2/22/12 blog), also a Spielberg product. His attention to detail is astonishing.  So, see both movies, for if you care about history, you will find they are connected more than you imagine, and they fit each other like a glove.  As sure as the day follows night, “Lincoln” follows “Amistad.”

Mark Twain Quote:

“It was no accident that planted Lincoln on a Kentucky farm, half way between the lakes and the Gulf. The association there had substance in it. Lincoln belonged just where he was put. If the Union was to be saved, it had to be a man of such an origin that should save it. No wintry New England Brahmin could have done it, or any torrid cotton planter, regarding the distant Yankee as a species of obnoxious foreigner. It needed a man of the border, where civil war meant the grapple of brother and brother and disunion a raw and gaping wound. It needed one who knew slavery not from books only, but as a living thing, knew the good that was mixed with its evil, and knew the evil not merely as it affected the negroes, but in its hardly less baneful influence upon the poor whites. It needed one who knew how human all the parties to the quarrel were, how much alike they were at bottom, who saw them all reflected in himself, and felt their dissensions like the tearing apart of his own soul. When the war came Georgia sent an army in gray and Massachusetts an army in blue, but Kentucky raised armies for both sides. And this man, sprung from Southern poor whites, born on a Kentucky farm and transplanted to an Illinois village, this man, in whose heart knowledge and charity had left no room for malice, was marked by Providence as the one to "bind up the Nation's wounds." “