Saving Lincoln
Directed by Salvador Litvak
In Saving Lincoln’s most striking scene, the screen goes fuzzy, then sharpens as Abraham Lincoln (Tom Amandes) argues with a fierce George McClellan (Jamie Elman). Suddenly Alexander Gardner (Nick George) moves out from behind a camera and demands stillness. The mouths of both actors have snapped grimly shut and their eyes narrow as Gardner slowly counts: “one…two…three….” This live animation of one of the most famous images of Antietam is certainly enjoyable for the audience, and the interrupted argument is amusing. What is most arresting, though, is that this is one of a handful of scenes in which the film’s special effects (created with a technique director Salvador Litvak calls “CineCollage”) are deliberately exposed, then employed as a plot device.
Litvak filmed the entire movie with the actors performing in front of a green screen, then inserted sliced wedges of Civil War–era photos to create a stylized 3-D black-and-white “set.” The Antietam scene comes after the audience has had time to adjust to this strange new visual world, which comes across as both historically authentic and surreal. It calls attention to photography as a wartime experience, but also to Litvak’s use of photographic images to create the wartime world on film.
Typically, historical films attempt to render the past in a visually convincing way— we are meant to believe that this is the landscape of the past via the erasure of modern elements and the inclusion of period detail through material culture. But CineCollage is not meant to create a sense of realism. Litvak’s film explodes that conceit, creating a historical world that calls attention to the process of creation. Some viewers may find this annoying or distracting, but the sets are often haunting.
Unfortunately, the inventiveness of CineCollage is not mirrored in the script. The narrative is a bromance, tracking the friendship of Ward Hill Lamon (Lea Coco) and Lincoln from their meeting at a bar in Illinois to the White House celebration of Robert E. Lee’s surrender. Along the way, Lamon saves Lincoln’s life multiple times, in Baltimore, along the lonely road between the White House and Lincoln’s summer cottage, and also at Fort Stevens. The film covers a span of some years, however, and Litvak makes the same mistake that Steven Spielberg does in Lincoln: He takes on too much, and as a result the movie becomes a repetitive, generalized march through the war’s major events. Lamon is constantly striding up to Lincoln and reprimanding him for putting his life at risk. By the third or fourth time, you’re rolling your eyes along with the president. If only the focus had been narrow and deep rather than broad and shallow—dealing with just the Baltimore plot, for example—Litvak could have employed far more narrative tension and character development.
Litvak’s Lincoln is, like Spielberg’s, a complex man. He loves telling jokes and singing songs, and we see him facing much pressure and criticism. By focusing on his friendship with Lamon, Litvak humanizes the president, and he also almost literally brings him down to our level by choosing not to manipulate Amandes’ height so that he towers over the other actors (the one exception is McClellan, whose shortness is played for laughs).
Litvak cites Carl Sandburg’s Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and the War Years as a major source for the screenplay, which he and his writing partner and wife Nina Davidovich Litvak loved for its poetic language. Unfortunately, not much of that poetry is present in the dialogue, which has been pulled from Lincoln’s letters and speeches and Lamon’s reminiscences. Nineteenth-century prose often sounds stilted when spoken, and as a result something unfortunate happens in Saving Lincoln: The film’s wooden language and plodding narrative, which are historically authentic, clash with and ultimately undermine the unrealistic Civil War world that Litvak has created on the screen. The audience waits—“one…two…three”—for this conflict to resolve into a sharp, detailed depiction of Lincoln, his friend and his war. But it never does.
Originally published in the June 2013 issue of Civil War Times. To subscribe, click here.
