Upon starting in his second term, Lincoln, the president of the United States, a kind president that seeks to achieve peace across the world, struggles against making his best decision, in order to end the Civil Wars, and at the same time, he has a deep will of amending for constitution, in order to ban slavery.
In the same way Ben Kingsley was born to play Gandhi, Daniel Day-Lewis was born to play the 16th president of the United States; it's a wholesale suspension of disbelief.
Lincoln offers proof of what magic can happen when an actor falls in love with his character. Because as great as Day-Lewis has been in his many parts, he has never seemed quite so smitten.
It's the most remarkable movie Steven Spielberg has made in quite a spell, and one of the things that makes it remarkable is how it fulfills those expectations by simultaneously ignoring and transcending them.
Lincoln paints a powerful and compelling portrait of the man who has become an icon. We don't need to see more of his life to understand how rare a figure he was - this window is more than sufficient.
Masterfully crafted as it is -- and it certainly captures the man and a moment in time -- Lincoln comes across as a pious history lesson, and, strangely for Spielberg, lacks the entertainment and emotion we may have expected.