Young Mr. Lincoln

[Liz Rosenthal]

I thought that Young Mr. Lincoln was awful, but I don't believe that it was Henry Fonda's fault. He did the best he could with poor material.

The Lincoln in this movie seems half-dead. He walks like he has forever to get somewhere, as if he has no energy. Despite Billy Herndon's claims to the contrary, Lincoln's colleagues back in Springfield recalled him as having a lot of energy. One individual in particular recalled that it was all he could do to keep up with Abe. (I can't remember where I saw this recollection, although it might have been from Nicolay's interviews with Springfield contemporaries, a collection edited by Burlingame that I recently read.)

Also, the Lincoln in Young Mr. Lincoln never cracked a smile. Granted, the real Lincoln did suffer from melancholy, but when he told stories his face tended to get quite animated.

The events depicted in the movie were only very loosely based on occurrences in the life of the youthful Lincoln. The characters and circumstances in Young Mr. Lincoln came off as whitebread. And the putty they put on Henry Fonda's nose to make it look bigger just made him look goofy, for want of a more respectable adjective.

If Lincoln had really been the way he was portrayed in that movie - a slow-moving gloomy gulch with an expressionless face - he wouldn't have gotten anywhere in politics and wouldn't have been our 16th president!

I realize that Hollywood had different standards back then for portraying American history; writer and director had to make it palatable for the broadest audience possible, and with no hint of iconoclasm. That may explain why the movie turned out the way it did, but the explanation still doesn't turn Young Mr. Lincoln into a good movie. Blechh.

That's one of many reasons why Spielberg's Lincoln was a godsend to me. Watching it is probably the closest I or anyone else will get to experiencing the real man. Not that I don't have a few quibbles about how Daniel Day-Lewis portrayed him physically - i.e., a little too bent, almost feeble - but I can recognize artistic reasons for enfeebling the physical Lincoln. It suggested all that he had gone through in the war, that the world was almost literally on his shoulders, that he was exhausted, that he had had enough. But I digress. I'm in love with 98.5% of Daniel Day-Lewis's portrayal.