Lincoln (Steven Spielberg, 2012)

Like so many modern movie titles, Lincoln is only one word, and as with so many other titles, this offers an oversimplified, even misleading idea of what the actual film contains. Though Steven Spielberg roped in perhaps the most noteworthy white elephant actor of our time, Daniel Day-Lewis, to portray the 16th president, Lincoln concerns the man only elliptically. He appears chiefly as a do-gooder who relies on Machiavellian practices, one of which is the use of others to do his dirty work. And though the film concentrates on the passage of the 13th Amendment, Lincoln’s most celebrated achievement and undoubtedly an act of great good, Lincoln reveals that the path to that moment was rough and dirty, indeed.

That filth can be seen in the film’s first shots, the only ones of the movie to take place on a battlefield, or at least the only one to do so during a battle rather than the still aftermath. In a few gruesomely intimate but stably mounted shots, Spielberg manages to top the false realism of Saving Private Ryan for sheer visceral repulsion. Unionists and Rebs have moved too close for musket fire, resorting to bayonet stabs, fistfights, even drowning foes in the rising rainwaters in trenches. It is brute savagery at its most chaotic and meaningless, and it hangs over the rest of the film as Lincoln alternately uses and is hindered by war developments in his quest to get slavery abolished. And as the footage is revealed to be the memories of black soldiers relating the battle to Lincoln, the pride they express in getting back at Confederates massacring all captured black soldiers hints at the tangle of racial strife that will only be compounded by the amendment, not solved by it.

The Amazing Spider-Man (Marc Webb, 2012)

Marc Webb's The Amazing Spider-Man would be a decent movie if it had nothing to do with comic books. When left to his own devices, Andrew Garfield gives Peter Parker an agreeably sardonic side, at once cocky and anxious as he spits out the quips sorely missing from Sam Raimi's post-9/11-tinged idealism. Garfield even enjoys ample chemistry with his leading lady, Emma Stone, which is a nice change of pace, not merely from Raimi's films but the superhero genre as a whole. Were the film nothing more than a slightly surreal abstraction of pimply and emotional hormone changes, it would make a fine romantic comedy powered by believable actors doing above-average work.


But this is a Spider-Man film, and the hormonal abstract in question concerns Parker's superpowers, which themselves entail a narrative arc of responsibility that generates the greatest tension of Parker's life. A good Spider-Man story is less about the fight between Spidey and the chosen villain than how his constant quest for a normal, happy life must be sacrificed for the greater civic good. That tension is wholly lacking in Webb's version, which recalls Green Lantern in its cynical rewrite of a noble character into a self-absorbed narcissist who always makes sure to hedge his bets on even the most tentative of mature actions so he ultimately emerges the same erratic jackass at the end of the film he was at the top.