"He Asks Questions I Can't Answer.....He's Got a Gift"

don2507

While this film is not for everyone, I was totally captivated by it. Perhaps because I'm quite familiar with Lincoln's biography and have been to the Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial in Indiana where Lincoln spent his boyhood years in an impossibly tiny cabin (by today's standards), the depiction of several years of that hardscrabble Indiana boyhood in this film were absorbing. True, as some critics have pointed out, there's no "narrative structure", i.e., developed storyline, to this film, but to me its progression of largely unrelated, and primarily non-verbal, vignettes nicely captured the physical, social, and emotional milieu in which the young Lincoln grew up. It's a remarkable story, and a tribute to both the (relatively) class-ness nature of mid-19th century America and Lincoln's own sturdy moral character and remarkable intellect, that "The Great Emancipator" and the "Savior of the Union" could emerge from such an impoverished environment. It's good to recall that Lincoln only received 9 months of formal schooling in his entire childhood.

And yet early on, as we see in this film, his mother recognized his intellect (see my heading above) and strives to find a schoolhouse for him without much enthusiasm from Lincoln's father who needs him for the relentless physical chores of their farm. We see Lincoln reading or thinking out in the fields and then his father admonishes him to get back to work. Truth be told, Lincoln did not like physical work and always wanted to work with his mind, and unfortunately disparaged his hard-working father for his lack of ambition. But we see the occasional moments of father-son bonding in the film, although some residual discord remained (years later when Lincoln was a successful railroad lawyer, he refrained from going to his father's funeral). The real sources of strength and encouragement for Lincoln were his mother, and most importantly, his stepmother, and we see that reflected in the various vignettes of this film.

The film is narrated by Lincoln's older cousin, who sometimes can be hard to follow in his backwoods dialect, and young Lincoln doesn't speak until the film is half-way over. Primarily, visual imagery depicts Lincoln's childhood milieu, and the cinematography is the most gorgeous I can recall from a black and white film. To round out the sensual experience and the emotional effect, the director has selected some beautiful pieces of music, e.g., Copeland, Dvorak, to accompany the enthralling visual imagery. For my money, 10 stars!

score 10/10

don2507 23 January 2018

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw4042127/