Lincoln

Sam Waterson and Mary Tyler Moore play Abraham and Mary Lincoln, 16th president of the United States and his first lady. A rather calculating politician from the mid west who invented a cracker-barrel image of himself that has passed into legend.

When John Ford and Henry Fonda made their Young Mr. Lincoln back in 1939, Ford allegedly told Fonda that he was not playing the Great Emancipator, but a hick country lawyer from New Salem. Waterson took some of that same advice in his performance. Lincoln shows just how much image management he used in making a bumpkin persona belie an incredible innate shrewdness. This was a man with so much confidence in his abilities to deal with people that he took in his two chief rivals William Seward and Salmon Chase in his cabinet as Secretaries of State and Treasury and worked with both.

Mary Tyler Moore gives one of her most memorable portrayals on the big and small screen as Mary Lincoln who was one woman with issues. She caused her patient husband no end of grief with her extravagance in the middle of the Civil War over her wardrobe and redecorating the White House. It all of course hid some incipient madness, lot of that brought on by the death of her son Willie.

Some meticulous research was done for this series as the personalities of Civil War Washington seem to have descended on the cast playing them. I particularly liked what James Gammon did with General Ulysses S. Grant a man who had two main characteristics, military genius and an occasional bad judgment in friends.

Lincoln's legend like JFK passed into our American scene with his assassination at the moment of his triumph holding the Union together. Forgetting the course the country would have taken had he lived and retired at the end of his second term in 1869, how would he be regarded today, as quite the mythic figure he is?

This mini-series should be well regarded and seen.

Mary Tyler Moore gives the best portrayal of Mary Todd Lincoln I have ever seen on screen.

Sam Waterson gives a very different portrayal of President Lincoln than we are used to. Generally, when we think of Lincoln we think of a man with a deep voice due to the fact that he was a very tall man and was well built. However Lincoln in fact did not have a deep voice according to some reports that I have read, in fact he had a high pitched voice and he had that Kentucky accent. (Kentucky? The Hell you say, Lincoln was from Illinois, yes this is true, however Lincoln was born in Kentucky, he was raised mostly in Illinois though)

This film gives us a good look at Lincoln the man, at the True Abraham Lincoln. Yes this film only spends a small amount of time on the assassination and spends none on the conspirators at all.

If you want to see a very good portrayal of the Lincoln assassination that is very in depth, try watching "The Day Lincoln was Shot" which was a television movie made for TNT. In fact the "Day Lincoln was shot" is a nice accompanying piece to this movie.

If you ever get the opportunity to watch either one of these films take it you won't regret it.

I thought this movie was excellent. The acting was well-done, in my opinion. Mary Tyler Moore did a superb job in her role as Mary Todd Lincoln.

I don't know how much Gore Vidal's book, upon which this movie is based, reflects the truth about Abraham Lincoln. However, this movie shows a very different Abraham Lincoln than the American myth of "Honest Abe." Lincoln is portrayed as an ambitious politic, not above coaxing the facts put forth to the public in order to win votes for the new Republican Party, and who eventually becomes rather subdued and serious about life after a series of events unfold.

Anyone studying or interested in this period of American History or in Lincoln should give this movie a watching, if only for the perspectives given.

I really expected a better performance from Waterson. He looks too frazzled and the dialogue often rings false. Moore came across well as a woman losing it bit by bit.

This is NOT "unbelievable garbage", as some other critics, here, would say.

I am tired of those who would compare books to the movies made from them. For God's sake, a movie is INTERPRATIVE!!! When you read "The Nutcracker Suite", do you criticize the very beautiful ballet because EVERY WORD of the original book is not adhered to?

The PERFORMANCE given by Mr. Waterston is enough to launch this vehicle into greatness. He is simply wonderful.

You can HAVE Mary Tyler Moore. But Waterston is astonishing. And he always IS.

If people insist on criticizing films because they don't "match" the book from which they are taken, I suggest that they do NOT call themselves "film lovers".

This theory has been argued for decades, but still, people do not understand.

It is IMPOSSIBLE to put every thought, every line from a book, into a film. Please get used to this.

Thanks so much. -Studiojudio