LINCOLN

Steven Spielberg has made more obviously entertaining and more emotionally seductive movies than Lincoln, but this is for him the most brave and, for the audience, most demanding picture in the 40 years since his emergence as a major director. It's a film about statesmanship, politics, the creation of the world's greatest democracy, and it's concerned with what we can learn from the study and contemplation of history. Spielberg and his eloquent screenwriter, the playwright Tony Kushner, handle these themes with flair, imagination and vitality, andDaniel Day-Lewis embodies them with an indelible intelligence as the 16th president of the United States

Lincoln begins a year before the end of the civil war with the movie's only battle scene. It's a minute of the bloody, hand-to-hand combat at Jenkins' Ferry, Arkansas, that by a brilliant piece of editing legerdemain is transformed into two black soldiers recalling the battle while talking to Lincoln about the future of the Union. The scene establishes the rock-like physical presence of the war-weary president, his warmth, modesty and humanity. The picture concludes a year later with a non-triumphalist coda that follows five days after Confederate general Robert E Lee's surrender.

With immense adroitness Spielberg avoids the high drama of the actual assassination at Ford's theatre on 14 April 1865, showing us the news being broken to Lincoln's young son, Tad, at another theatre and then bringing us to Lincoln's deathbed where secretary of war Edwin Stanton pronounces the celebrated epitaph: "Now he belongs to the ages" (though he might actually have said "to the angels"). This is followed by a brief concluding flashback to Lincoln's second inaugural address a month earlier, with its cautious message of hope and realism.

The heart of the film is a few weeks in January 1865 in an overcast wintry Washington between Lincoln's second election and his inauguration. In this brief moment of opportunity he's faced with a crucial decision. Should he end this bloody war, one of the most costly, bitter and divisive in modern history, by a compromising peace with the Confederate enemy? Or should he make a final attempt to persuade the House of Representatives to reverse an earlier decision and enact the 13th Amendment to the constitution? This would declare that "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction".

This incendiary issue – involving the abolition of slavery and all this might entail for equality in all its forms – is at the centre of this drama. Lincoln must handle it on a variety of fronts: the military, the electorate, a Congress divided on this issue, and his own family. As Doris Kearns Goodwin shows in her book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, the key source of the film's screenplay, he had astutely brought together gifted people who'd been his opponents in order both to wage war and to advance his social, moral and political policies. And the film is about the way this principled statesman and wily politician was ready to bend rules, reinterpret the law and manipulate people, but always with the object of serving democracy and securing America's moral leadership on the world stage.

Lincoln is playing a deadly game, juggling a variety of balls. Simultaneously he must hold his cabinet together with the particular help of his closest, most honest confidant, secretary of state Seward (David Strathairn), to gather the votes necessary to secure the vote he needs in Congress and keep secret the presence of a top peace-seeking delegation from the south. Beyond this he must reassure his generals that the war will be prosecuted with full intensity, and he must deal with his family. His eldest son Robert wants to leave university and serve in the army, while his wife, the troubled and devoted Mary (Sally Field), cannot bear to lose another son after the death of her beloved William, who died three years earlier.

There is, too, another strand, almost a film in itself and a source of both fun and realism, in the presence of three political fixers, Washington lobbyists before the term was coined. Colourfully played by James Spader, John Hawkes and Tim Blake Nelson, they're cynical idealists, getting people to change their minds by bribery, blackmail and coercion. They're part of a gallery of more than 100 speaking roles, all significant in their way, and they impose themselves on us in a brisk, lucid story that's superbly edited, designed and photographed. John Williams's score, however, is somewhat overemphatic.

At the centre of this bustling social panorama is Lincoln: explaining himself through endless anecdotes and folksy memories; quoting Shakespeare, the Bible and Euclid to make his ideas persuasive; exploiting his simple eloquence to get people to do what's right; knowing just when and where to press his advantage. He grows old before our eyes and we believe it when Grant tells him that he's aged a decade over the past year.

In a towering performance, Day-Lewis encompasses the great statesman who shaped history, the intimate man of the people and the mysterious, charismatic figure who so fascinated Picasso that he collected thousands of pictures of him and once held up a photograph of Lincoln, proclaiming: "There is the real American elegance!"

1. Lincoln
2. Production year: 2012
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4. Countries: India, Rest 
5. of the world, USA
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7. Cert (UK): 12A
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9. Runtime: 150 mins
10. Directors: Steven Spielberg
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12. Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis, David Strathairn, Hal Holbrook, James Spader, John Hawkes, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Lee Pace, Sally Field, Tommy Lee Jones

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