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" Now that the election is over, we can all forget about the dispiriting, brutal, and, for the most part, grindingly boring reality of politics, and return to feeling vaguely dreamy about democracy and the American spirit. Steven Spielberg is willing to serve up that lovely dreaminess, releasing Lincoln this weekend, into the all-purpose glow of Obama&amp;#039;s reelection. The political situation could not have worked out better for Spielberg. The film reenacts the period immediately preceding Lincoln&amp;#039;s second inaugural address, and I don&amp;#039;t need Nate Silver to predict that Obama will do his best to recreate that same moment in January. The historical has coincided with the contemporary, and Lincoln fits perfectly in between, with the great fortune that Spielberg always manages to design for himself. It&amp;#039;s a film that wants to achieve greatness, that wants to be an Important Work of Art with all the words capitalized. It&amp;#039;s a movie that isn&amp;#039;t afraid, even, to compare itself with Shakespeare.  When I was a professor of Shakespeare, in a previous lifetime, occasionally people who thought they knew what they were talking about would come up to me and offer some variation of the following comment: &amp;quot;If Shakespeare were alive today, he&amp;#039;d be in advertising.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;If Shakespeare were alive today, he&amp;#039;d be in reality television.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;If Shakespeare were alive today, he&amp;#039;d design apps.&amp;quot; And so on. It was always garbage, of course. But I&amp;#039;ve had my own answer to this old question. I always believed that if Shakespeare were alive today, he&amp;#039;d be like Steven Spielberg, a maker of mass entertainment fused with high art constructed with intense control and detail to maximum effect. He is the one director alive about whom the comparison to Shakespeare is not ridiculous. The explicit references to Shakespeare in Lincoln begin early and continue throughout. The president quotes Shakespeare often, with a preference for the tragedies over the comedies. Lincoln is the perfect character for such Shakespearean treatment, by the way. Lincoln actually contains several in-jokes about these references. Lincoln, the historical figure, did actually quote Shakespeare regularly. The day before his assassination, he was riding a steamboat up the Potomac with Charles Sumner and others, and started reciting Macbeth. He even read aloud the passage in which Shakespeare coined the word &amp;quot;assassination&amp;quot; \u2014 the day before he became the first American president to be assassinated. He was killed in a theater, by John Wilkes Booth, a well-known Shakespearean actor, whose brother Edwin may have been the greatest American Shakespearean actor of all time. (I admit to being obsessed with Shakespearean connections to Lincoln&amp;#039;s assassination. I wrote a chapter about it in my book How Shakespeare Changed Everything.) But the references to Shakespeare in Lincoln are implicit as well as explicit. The film is loosely based on Lincoln&amp;#039;s work to pass the Thirteenth Amendment, which is a very Shakespearean moment in American history, so laced with the contradictions of virtue and vice, the personal and the political. Lincoln had to hire outside operatives to buy votes from Democrats, men who had lost their seats in the recent election but had not run out their terms of office yet. Meanwhile, he was delaying delegates from the Confederate States who were seeking peace, all the while trying to end the war. He was fighting with his son over joining the military. His wife&amp;#039;s sanity was on a knife&amp;#039;s edge, as she tried to deal with the grief of a dead son. We see Lincoln in all his massive variety \u2014 his almost saintly devotion to the war and his unflinching utilization of dirty tricks. We see his highest-flying oratory and his ease with filthy jokes about George Washington. This combination of very minute family drama within the larger themes of historically important events is typically Shakespearean, and Spielberg is clearly imitating him. Unfortunately, Lincoln fails to meet Spielberg&amp;#039;s own lofty standard. Lincoln is to movies what the Jefferson Memorial is to sculpture. Unlike Shakespeare, who manages to find ordinary human beings in historical figures and then make their realities evident to everybody, Spielberg finds only the sentimental at the core of matters both large and small. Part of the problem is in the Thirteenth Amendment itself. This was a grand, gruesome struggle to determine that African-Americans were human beings. Swaying music swells over the scenes of this supposedly magnificent accomplishment, but it all seems a tad silly. The definition of white liberal guilt is to make yourself feel good about stuff that is just normal human decency, and this is the extreme example. Acknowledging that African-Americans are human beings is not an achievement. It&amp;#039;s just a sign that you&amp;#039;re not intellectually and morally damaged. The personal in Lincoln is similarly loose. Daniel Day-Lewis appears historical even when he&amp;#039;s cuddling his son. He just can&amp;#039;t manage to seem normal. Both aspects of the character seem hokey, and empty \u2014 missing the essential humanness that saves historical drama from just being costumes and ideas.  Spielberg can sometimes be underrated as a filmmaker. It happened with Munich, which was a superb, complete revenge drama, and with Minority Report, the best sci-fi movie since Blade Runner. If some kid director had made those films, he or she would be hailed as a genius. If Christopher Nolan had made them, they would be considered significant statements about contemporary life. Lack of recognition doesn&amp;#039;t appear to be coming with Lincoln, which has already been mooted as an Oscar contender. It feels made that way, made to win an Oscar, made to be called Great, and therefore it fails to be great. Spielberg may be the Shakespeare of our time. He really might be. But when Spielberg tries to be Shakespeare, he isn&amp;#039;t.  Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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