Lincoln (Steven Spielberg, 2012)

[Robert de la Cheyniest]

I have a ton of respect for Rosenbaum but man, he has gotten so crotchety and annoying in the past few years that I honestly have a hard time reading his recent stuff.

[Brian C]

His old stuff is no different. He was always like that.

[hearthesilence]

Yeah, I don't think he's really changed. He's still very insightful when he champions a film, and while he's really stuck it to some prominent critics' favorites in these past two years alone - The Master, Leviathan, Zero Dark Thirty, Melancholia, The Tree of Life - it's not like the films of his top ten lists aren't completely out of left field, most of his picks are consensus faves.

[knives]

I don't know if this is a great, an embarrassing, or both thing.

[willoneill]

I like how they use a clerical error to explain why it took so long, yet no one acknowledges that only ratifying the abolishment of slavery in 1995 is pretty much equally as embarrassing.

[lacritfan]

Sigh...I can't believe I'm gonna post this but the most accurate, concise review of this film is

...I couldn't find a single flaw in it, but I was still so bored.

[matrixschmatrix]

I don't know if this is a great, an embarrassing, or both thing.

Institutionalized racism in Mississippi, of course, is still fine

[ando]

It certainly speaks to what Andrei Tarkovsky meant by being horrified at the prospect of having made a Spielberg film.

Can you expound upon this or offer a link for further reading? I never knew that Tarkovsky ever commented on Spielberg's work.

Thanks in advance.

I finally found the darned passage (sorry for the wait). It's from an interview pushished by Sight & Sound magazine, circa 1982:

Tarkovsky: Cinema is an art form which involves a high degree of tension, which may not generally be comprehensible. It's not that I don't want to be understood, but I can't, like Spielberg, say, make a film for the general public — I'd be mortified if I discovered I could. If you want to reach a general audience, you have to make films like Star Wars and Superman which have nothing to do with art. This doesn't mean I treat the public like idiots, but I certainly don't take pains to please them. I don't know why I'm always so defensive in front of journalists — I might need you one of these days, especially if my film gets the same kind of distribution as Angelopoulos'!

The full interview.

[MichaelB]

Interestingly, Andrzej Wajda gave an interview to Sight & Sound at around the same time in which he said more or less precisely the opposite - that Polish filmmakers' inability to duplicate Spielberg's knack for reaching a mass audience was seriously holding them back in terms of getting their message across at a time when Polish audiences were demonstrably keen to hear it.

Granted, for all the artistic pre-eminence of his best films, Wajda has never been a "high-art" auteur in the way that Tarkovsky saw himself (and many of his films have been whopping domestic hits in a way that Tarkovsky's never were), but it's interesting to see such divergent attitudes towards the notion of general audience appeal.

[ando]

Well, the obvious issue there is what Wajda considers a Polish film to be. Can you say that Spielberg sets out to make generally American films?

Spielberg does make us feel good in our complacency; which is often what films intended for a general audience tend to do.

[MichaelB]

Well, the obvious issue there is what Wajda considers a Polish film to be. Can you say that Spielberg sets out to make generally American films?

I don't think Wajda intended to make a nationalist point, except insofar as he considers himself a primarily Polish filmmaker making films for primarily Polish audiences (he's grateful for the international attention, but it's less important to him). Which is why he was fascinated by the hold that Spielberg seemed to have on his public, and curious as to why none of his compatriots had a similar effect on their domestic audiences.

Spielberg does make us feel good in our complacency; which is often what films intended for a general audience tend to do.

I doubt very much that that would be Wajda's intention - indeed, his entire career has been devoted to shaking Polish audiences out of their complacency and making them feel anything but good about it. But that may of course be part of the (perceived) problem.

[ando]

... insofar as he considers himself a primarily Polish filmmaker making films for primarily Polish audiences

Wouldn't that make his agenda a nationlist one?

Whether his aims or nationalist or not his material is strongly universal as it considers moral issues with which everyone in the world can relate. And he's not afraid to face them.

Spielberg, on the other hand, seems to be obsessed with fear. I've always felt he had more in common with Hitchcock than some of the other so-called great American directors like Ford or Hawks. He's always on the periphery of life (though a proud insider); never really involved or deeply explorative of the human condition. In fact, there's a deep fear of the unconscious or inchoate aspects of the human psyche. All his films exhibit this apect of this fear in some respect. In Lincoln, one of the strongest moments - on a deeply human level (not group carnage or buffoonery) - is the moment between Sally Field and D.D. Lewis (as Mary Todd and Abe, respectively) where Abe's threats to commit Mary to a mental institution due to what he considers her inability to handle grief. She, of course, challenges him to do so knowing all the while that he can no more face that than deal with the death of his son. Now, my question is, why this scene? Why does the emotional arc of the film pivot around this scene? Abe doesn't have time to deal properly with domestic issues because he has to save a country. Similarly, chief Brody in Jaws doesn't have time to spend with his family because he has to save Amityville, Long Island from a scaly 25 foot monster. Tom Cruise doesn't cut the mustard as a father in War of the Worlds but he can sure kick alien butt. The threats to Mr. Spielberg's psyche and emotional stability are monstrous. So much so that he often can't think of anything else but to annihilate them. Whether or not this is typically American is debatable. But audiences sure love coming back for more of the stuff. It's what I initially alluded to as the type of appeal that Tarkovsky would be horrified to discover about his own work.

[MichaelB]

... insofar as he considers himself a primarily Polish filmmaker making films for primarily Polish audiences

Wouldn't that make his agenda a nationlist one?

This really depends on your definition of "nationalism", and I'd be reluctant to apply such a loaded label to an artist as complicated and ambiguous as Wajda. Not least because so many of his films are explicitly about Poles fighting Poles (physically, verbally, ideologically), or dramatise shameful episodes in Polish history that more straightforwardly patriotic Poles would prefer not to think about.

So I'd say that they're only "nationalist" in the sense that he's devoted the bulk of his career to analysing aspects of his country's history and (then) present, on the grounds that that's the subject he knows best - and his main target audience are his compatriots because he also knows them best (as far as I'm aware, he doesn't speak any other languages, certainly not fluently).

[ando]

I'm only addressing this issue of nationalism because the phrase "at a time when Polish audience were keen to hear it" poses more questions about the nature of national appeal than provide an alternative viewpoint to Tarkovsky's apparent disdain for pandering to audiences in general.
'
In other words, I think Spielberg is every bit as universal as Wajda in terms of appeal though their concerns may be very different. It brings up the whole question of the function of cinema, really; how audiences are conditioned by it and what we expect from it.