"Our One Common Country" author talk in Stratford, CT

[James Conroy]

David:

Yours is the most interesting critique of the Spielberg film that I have read, despite your having decided to look no further than the trailer. I was enormously impressed by the performances of Daniel Day Lewis, Tommy Lee Jones, Sally Field, and others, and also by the look and feel of the film, all of which are worth the price of admission, but its accuracy disappointed me. Spielberg is quite right. Popular film and popular history are different things; but the past can be brought to life without changing it, as readers and reviewers have been kind enough to say about Our One Common Country: Abraham Lincoln and the Hampton Roads Peace Conference of 1865 (see http://www.jamesbconroy.com), which addresses the same subjects as the film. (The overlap, by the way, was entirely accidental. I started working on the book three years before the film appeared.)

Apart from the points noted in my previous post, the film's many flaws, in my opinion, range from Mary Lincoln's portrayal as a politically talented feminist, to a depiction of Francis Preston Blair as the virtual puppeteer of the Republican conservatives in the United States Senate, to specific facts like the location of the Hampton Roads peace conference, to trivial details like the name of the servant who accompanied Blair on his peacemaking trip to Richmond. Most unfortunate of all is what seems to me to be the anachronistic portrayal of Lincoln and other mid-nineteenth century Republicans as if they were twenty-first century Democrats. Lincoln, Thaddeus Stevens, and William Seward were products of their times. They freely articulated racial views, for example, that would quite properly end the career of any politician who expressed them in 2014. They were among the greatest men of their day, but men of their day they were. It does them no honor to present them to the public as if they thought, spoke and acted in 1865 like motivational speakers addressing a Hollywood fundraiser in 2014.

In my opinion, "Lincoln" is a beautifully acted, evocatively presented film, and in many ways an admirable work of art, but the true story of the Hampton Roads Peace Conference and the startling, counter-intuitive roles that men like Ulysses S. Grant, Jefferson Davis, and Abraham Lincoln played in it are cinematic enough without the embellishments and artistic license that permeate the movie.