YOUNG MR. LINCOLN

by Kevin Koehler

Roughly one half hour into Young Mr. Lincoln, our hero the Great Emancipator stands between a lynch mob and a jailhouse holding two young white men accused of murder. Vigilante justice, he tells them, is not something to be taken lightly. "The next thing you know...it gets to the place where a man can't pass a tree or look at a rope without feeling uneasy." Awfully prescient, Abe, though I doubt it's your fair-skinned defendants who will reflexively touch their throats at the sight of a noose in the decades to come.

Later in the picture, a woman describes how her husband was killed by a "drunk Indian." We feel bad for her since she is a nice woman going through a lot - a lot being her sons on trial for murder (even though the boys are being defended by Abraham Lincoln so they'll probably get off, but she doesn't know that) - and nobody deserves to have their husband killed by a drunk Indian. Nobody.

Poor martyred Saint Abraham is about as mythical a figure as there is in American folklore. John Ford's much-admired (but highly fictionalized) portrait brings humanity to the legend. It does this chiefly by showing the young Mr. Lincoln as he was, not the legend but the man. And damned if this man wasn’t the most perfect individual to ever walk the Earth since God's Own Son. There is a good chance actually that Abraham Lincoln may have been an angel masquerading in human form and not a man at all. You see, Young Mr. Lincoln is a film about truth, not facts.

If you believed Lincoln was conscious of race, or that race even existed in the world where he developed a moral conscience (outside of drunk Indians killing nice old lady's husbands), you sir would be mistaken. There is simply no room for race in Lincoln's complicated ethical quandary where he must choose between defending two innocent men accused of murdering an a-hole (who, truth be told, was in need of little killin') and...not defending them. Okay, Sophie's Choice it isn't, but we are reminded of a certain Meryl Streep picture when mom is asked in court to finger which son stuck a knife in the murdered man (setting one brother free and sending the other to the gallows). Fortunately, she's shielded from certain psychic harm when another character intervenes on her behalf, saving the proverbial day. And that character's name just happens to be included in the title of this very picture. Afterward, he spread his angel wings and took flight.

Overall, the film has the feel of a Star Wars: Episode I for Civil War reenactors, existing for the purpose of revisiting characters/people we know and love, but you know... they're younger this time around. Look, there's Stephen Douglas, Abe's future political rival. And there's Mary Todd Lincoln, except she's just Mary Todd because they haven't gotten married yet (and she's a hottie - Honest Abe, you sly dog). What, no chance meeting with John Wilkes Booth while hunting for beaver pelts? How about a rail-splitting contest between Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, bragging rights and a crumpled five-dollar bill to the winner?

I look forward to the sequel - the one with the guns, Pickett's Charge, and black people.

Interesting footnote: Film pioneer Sergei Eisenstein was a massive fan of Young Mr. Lincoln, so much in fact that he wrote a rather gushing essay about it. "Of all American films made up to now, Young Mr. Lincoln is the one I would wish, most all all, to have made." It's likely Eisenstein based much of his own Ivan the Terrible, Part I on Lincoln.

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