Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Not when there are already dozens of reviews, some excellent, some abysmal. Not when the subject involves so many antecedents and complexities. I couldn't imagine doing the film, or myself, justice within the scope of a few hundred words. However, an amazon friend, a citizen of Germany working in China, has sent me a request to explain why I found this film so successful. Here's my answer, which I might as well share: "You might need to have spent some of your youth celebrating Lincoln's birthday, or noticing Lincoln's picture on the penny, or reading some of the pop boys' books about the War. You might need to have read Walt Whitman's Civil War poetry, especially "When Lilacs Last etc", and more than once. Lincoln is a powerful shamanic totemic figure in the American mind, and seeing him made human by DDL is like being told yes, there is a heaven for pets or yes any child can become president. But the film handles the assassination with the greatest cinematic subtlety. Of course I've know about the assassination in great detail all my reading life. Of course I know the Gettysburg Address by heart (though generations younger than I am probably don't). Well, there came that moment in the film when the capstone had been placed, when the passage of the 13th Amendment had been achieved -- and any blathering fool who still argues that "the War was not about slavery" should have his mouth taped shut as teachers used to do in the USA in 'the good old days' -- that moment when in effect Lincoln had become immortal morally, and at that moment I sat in the theater agonized by foreknowledge, horrified by anticipating the next scene, which could only be the assassination. Oh no! No! Not now! let the Glory wave a short while! I'm not a guy who cries in cinemas, but I couldn't stop myself from bawling as if a close friend or sib were dying in my arms. Lincoln's death became a personal tragedy for me, for the first brief time, at that moment in the film. My dry historical awareness of the tragedy will never be merely intellectual again. Wait! Not yet! Spare me the scene of his death! I WANT HIM TO LIVE! And the film did spare us. The indirect treatment of the assassination was superb, humane, decent film-making. Proof, I'd argue, that "less" is sometimes "more", that dispassion can be more poignant than blaring cinemascopic 3-D amped-up violence. Perhaps not everyone in the audience was as affected as I was. There are people who quibble with DDL's portrayal of Lincoln as insufficiently awesome. There are people who ardently despise Lincoln as a tyrant and desecrator of "our" Constitution. My response to the film was personal and private, linked to my own life experience in the Civil Rights movement. But that response was more intense than I expected when I bought my ticket. More intense than at any film I've seen in many years."