in which I continue to fangirl Tony Kushner

[healingmirth]

So, needing to get out of the house and away from the television, a friend and I went to see Lincoln tonight.

Lincoln, you guys! It's so good. I was prepared for it to be an Important Movie, and Oscar bait, and it sort of is, but it's also just a really good movie. I'm glad I went to see it, and I'm glad I got to see it in a theater with a bunch of other people who were also laughing and murmuring along with us.

(Caveat, caveat, caveat: the opening and closing are sort of heavy-handed in setting the context, it's a total Bechdel fail unless I've already forgotten something, and they missed, as has been noted elsewhere, opportunities for characters of color, but at least personally I can accept that as Kushner's dense, tightly-scripted, authentic representation of events that takes place mostly in rooms that were entirely white and entirely male.)

All of the acting: also so, so good. I didn't know anything about the cast going in, so it was a constant exercise in "hey, it's that guy!" (or much, much more rarely, woman) and then immediately forgetting who I was watching in appreciating their performance.

Comments

[muccamukk]

I think Mary Lincoln briefly talked to her maid while they were watching Congress? I don't remember Mary talking to other women at the party.

I really liked it. The writing and acting were really on point. The whiteness of the cast in a Southern city in a movie about Emancipation bothered me a bit. If they could include Mr Bilbo, they could have included black people doing stuff. Anyway. I liked it.

[healingmirth]

I was thinking about the House scenes, and I just couldn't remember them exchanging words, only one-sided statements, which made it seem worse.

They at least made good use of black actors as soldiers and in crowd shots, but yeah, I would have taken a conversation or a rally or a Frederick Douglass speech in a second instead of the last two scenes.