One can hardly quarrel with the film critics. Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln" is a cinematic masterpiece, and Daniel Day-Lewis, in the title role, delivers a bravura performance depicting the 16th president as a quintessentially deft politician and preternaturally wise statesman -- as an anguished-yet-resigned, grim-yet-playful, just-yet-generous, stern-yet-loving, flawed-yet-virtuous, utterly human-yet-transcendent figure, operating at a crucial juncture in the nation's history.
The film should also please historians, generally. While it takes some dramatic liberties with the facts of Lincoln's life and the circumstances surrounding passage of the constitutional amendment that ended slavery, "Lincoln" mainly gets to the historical truth of these things.
Still, on one historical matter, Abraham Lincoln's religion, the film simply misses the mark.
To be sure, there are occasional references to the president's religious views in Spielberg's "Lincoln." The opening soldiers' recitation of the Gettysburg Address includes the obligatory "this nation, under God," and Day-Lewis's powerful reenactment of the Second Inaugural Address faithfully quotes both the passage about the Civil War as God's just punishment of the nation for slavery and the iconic lines: "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in ..." There is also the scene in which Lincoln shares with his wife his desire to visit Jerusalem, and another in which he wryly bemoans God's task in having to end slavery with an instrument as unmanageable as the House of Representatives.
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