One had the feeling it was Lincoln himself, finally, winning the Oscars for best of the best, what we all do, act.  Mr. Day Lewis, a fine genetic relative, from frame and brow and skin down to a closeness of the very same voice, prone to need to rise to be itself and make a good point, to make itself a little bit louder, serves an excellent choice of stand in, with plenty enough of the same soul that we all have inner access to.

It came down to scenes like the telegraph office, a shawl around the President's sleepless shoulders, asking the kids (the young guys working), 'what do you make of it all,' or, 'what do you think this is all about,' with complete interest, then, offering, as we all do, our own story.

These stories of Lincoln we are prepared for, from Sandburg and the like, the work of historians, interviewing Herndon, common people's memories lasting 'til the end of the 19th century.  Oral history.  The gist of his personality coming through letters, all easy to get sentimental about.  An every day guy.

Did he, as Kushner places emphasis, have great tension with oldest son Robert about signing up for the war?  Narrative arch stuff, keeps the eye, misleading in some ways, true in other ways, if, say, you really wanted to get down to the nitty gritty between, as Spielberg's Lincoln is intent on, Abraham and Mary Lincoln.

But, I myself wonder, why was the final dream, of Lincoln's ignored and passed over?  His dream of coming down, just days before Good Friday, April 14th, to see the muffled casket, and asking 'whose it was?'  Day Lewis certainly would have read, rehearsed in his mind, such a moment, the deep sensitivity, and even alignment with dreams as Lincoln, the poet, had.  That would have refocussed the energy, the dynamic between the intimate husband and wife in a different way from Kushner's script.  It would have given us a script where we all face the ultimate, in which we all know, at some point, we will die.  Would not the math of Lincoln's life experience, as a lawyer, seeing people's life shit, as a depressive, as a dreamer, the dreamer an integral part of all his aspirations, of seeing his own mortality (why else would you help a pig up out of complete mud?) lead him to a conclusion about doing the right thing, and doing the right thing only.  Strong, fearless, sensitive, perhaps he sensed, in his subconscious, in his dreams, the backlash for what he willed, but that not stopping him.  He may too have sensed his wife's afflictions, as part of all the diseases of mortality, a token of his understanding of human frailty and foible.

One gathers, though, that it's hard to make a movie, commercially successful, depending on Dreamworks funding, that tells a tale, as the classic Japanese films of the post WWII era might, of mortality, of a striving to do the right thing, met by equal and opposite forces, the ultimate meaninglessness, or, rather, the ultimate meaning gained through the grace of human respect and decency, the sense of honor and golden rule.  It would be hard to really lay out the life of Lincoln and the death of him, as our guts might understand the whole of him.  It would be hard to lay out the close up of him dying, even as the great photos close in on that same face we want to see, want more of, a fascinating thing.  It would be hard to interrupt the plot arch with the sudden cruel death, and yet we know that life does such things.  Fatalistic as he was, would Lincoln have sensed his own death as more tangible, closer, more inevitable, an understanding steeped in whatever spiritual understandings he may have come across.