The biopic has never been my favorite form of filmmaking. Which is not to say I haven't enjoyed a good many of them -- it's just that, inevitably, somewhere along the way I find myself thinking that there is just too much material for the one movie to do justice to. If they could just narrow their focus, I find myself thinking, pick one pivotal moment of the person's life and make a really strong movie about that, then we might have a much stronger movie.Well, Steven Spielberg has actually gone and made that movie I've been wanting to see all this time, and making my point a lot more effectively than I ever could.
Lincoln avoids the ungainly biopic-sprawl by focusing its dramatic energies on a single point in history. In the time between his re-election and inauguration, President Lincoln is determined to push through Congress the Thirteenth amendment to the Constitution, thereby finishing what he had started with his Emancipation Proclamation, and fixing it as unassailable law. The politicking and backroom-dealing involved in making this happen provide the narrative momentum, through which the person and character of Abraham Lincoln is presented.
In this sense the screenplay, by award-winning playwright Tony Kushner, feels more like a stage-play than a movie. And that may be a big part of what makes the narrative work so well. The biopic is a kind of distant cousin to the Overwrought-Big-Budget-Epic, in the sense that both types of movie can fall into the trap of creating sprawling, elaborate, and ultimately unnecessary, set pieces just because they can. A stage drama, on the other hand, is often at its best when it does more with less -- finding ways to bring the larger story into the one episode, the one location, the one dramatic moment that marks a turning point. It is, perhaps, something of a lost art which screenwriters might do well to re-learn.
