Exit
a pair of questions: “Did you like it,
or did you love it?” Goodwin, who
brought Holzer to Spielberg’s
attention after her book prompted
the director to make the film,
enthused to The Huffington Post
that watching Day-Lewis in the
title role was akin to “seeing this
man I lived with for 10 years wander around in front of everyone.”
By choosing to telescope onto
the president’s maneuvering of the
13th amendment, which outlawed
slavery on U.S. soil., the movie
redirects Lincoln’s saintly mythology closer to reality, says historian
Richard Norton Smith.
“It illustrates Lincoln’s genius as
a politician, both as the great public advocate and as a behind-thescenes wire puller who was perfectly willing to trail his garments
in the dust if that’s what it takes
to get what he knows to be right,”
Norton Smith told The Huffington
Post in a phone interview.
Holzer sets this “teachable moment” apart from other “round
number” occasions, aided as it is
by a blockbuster hit. For the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth, in
2009, publishers sent a bounty of
books to market, and mostly only
scholars noticed. This year, the
crop includes offerings for kids, by
CULTURE
authors as diverse in inclination
as Holzer himself (whom Disney
commissioned to write a young
adult companion book to the
movie) and right-wing hot-head
Bill O’Reilly. Adult offerings also
range, from fictional thrillers such
as the period mystery The Lincoln
Conspiracy, by The Huffington
Post’s own Timothy L. O’Brien,
to nonfiction titles with the basic catholic pitch of “Lincoln Plus
Anything Else” (for instance,
Lincoln And Medicine, and
Lincoln’s Forgotten Friend Leonard Swett, both released the same
month as the movie).
Norton Smith rattles off a list
of past Lincolns who’ve captured
the public imagination: “Racist
Lincoln,” “Dictator Lincoln” (both
sprung from scholarship on the
president’s changing views toward
slavery), “Brokeback Lincoln” and
“Prozac Lincoln.” As for naming
Day-Lewis’, he has a grander title:
“the Lincoln for our generation.”
“I can’t tell you how many depictions I’ve seen. No one has ever
communicated as Daniel DayLewis did a sense after seeing him
for two-and-a-half hours that this
is what it would have been like
to be in the presence of
Abraham Lincoln.”
HUFFINGTON
12.09.12