Lincoln Online

This was a well done movie, particularly for television. Sam Waterson's performance as Lincoln was well done. This will be evident to people who have taken the time to study Lincoln, the man, not what he is credited for. Lincoln is known for having a high pitched, "countrified" voice, which Waterson did very effectively. Lincoln was known for normally being a bit haggard looking, which was also portrayed well. His mannerisms and use of colloquialisms in conversation were accurately handled. The supporting cast did a fine job, particularly Richard Mulligan as Seward. Mary Tyler Moore was very effective portraying Mary Lincoln as they wanted it done in the movie. She certainly conveyed Mary Lincoln's mental shortcomings well. My only complaint is that the battle scenes used the same stock footage over and over, being that one can tell it was all filmed at one location. This is a good movie in general, and if you are a student of Lincoln, the man...surprisingly so.

Mary Tyler Moore gives the best portrayal of Mary Todd Lincoln I have ever seen on screen.

Sam Waterson gives a very different portrayal of President Lincoln than we are used to. Generally, when we think of Lincoln we think of a man with a deep voice due to the fact that he was a very tall man and was well built. However Lincoln in fact did not have a deep voice according to some reports that I have read, in fact he had a high pitched voice and he had that Kentucky accent. (Kentucky? The Hell you say, Lincoln was from Illinois, yes this is true, however Lincoln was born in Kentucky, he was raised mostly in Illinois though)

This film gives us a good look at Lincoln the man, at the True Abraham Lincoln. Yes this film only spends a small amount of time on the assassination and spends none on the conspirators at all.

If you want to see a very good portrayal of the Lincoln assassination that is very in depth, try watching "The Day Lincoln was Shot" which was a television movie made for TNT. In fact the "Day Lincoln was shot" is a nice accompanying piece to this movie.

If you ever get the opportunity to watch either one of these films take it you won't regret it.

I must disagree strongly with the correspondant who describes this film as garbage. I believe the production team, the writer and the efforts of Waterston and Tyler Moore have brilliantly captured Vidals characterisation of Honest Abe, both as politician and as a family man. Vidals GENIUS is the bi-play between Lincoln and Seward and Lincoln and Chase but in a three hour film it would be quite impossible to portray these intense rivalries and do any justice at all to the quality of the book. Many characters from the book are missing and there is no play at all of the assassination plotters that threads through the book. Nevertheless the Lincoln that has been lifted from the page makes for a most enjoyable film and well worth a viewing

I'm very glad to see this one out on video at last, as the one I had from TV is worn out. I found Sam Waterston's performance to be wonderfully well-rounded. From the calculated Lincoln wit & military management,to his personal powerlessness in the face of on going family tragedy. One of the best depictions of Abraham Lincoln I have seen, & I would be quite happy to see him take another turn at it anytime he gets the chance!

Mary Tyler Moore was marvellous as Mary Todd Lincoln, conveying the extremes of mental illness without going over the top & nullifying her warmth, intelligence, & independence, as other portrayals have!

Imagine my surprise upon renting this again, to find Thomas Gibson (Darhma & Greg) was Sprague. That's part of the fun of watching something not seen for a while, in my opinion; Seeing favorite performances again, & realizing who you'd watched before they were famous!

I have watched this movie many times, as I use it to teach US history to eighth graders. It is an excellent portrait of Lincoln, showing his complexity and compassion. Yes, VerhoHo from NYC, NY, the book is better, but a movie that exactly mirrored the book would last for weeks. I think the movie does a fine job of summarizing Gore Vidal's comprehensive and historically accurate account of Lincoln's years as president. After seeing the movie the first time, when it aired on TV, I wanted to read the book and did.

Sam Waterson and Mary Tyler Moore are fabulous in their roles and bring these historical figures to life. I was also surprised to see Thomas Gibson (first from "Chicago Hope," then "Dharma and Greg") portraying Gov. Sprague. His accent and costume really disguised his identity.

I also like the way the director muted colors and added to the melancholy of the era.

The natural tendency of a TV movie made about a turbulent time in history is to turn the story into a soap opera. That way, the producers can avoid expensive and expansive battle scenes with millions of extras, impeccable props and sets, monumental stars, and dialog that, having been rewritten and polished to a sheen, sings with poetry. Instead we can get a love triangle with two people in each scene, arguing and insinuating away to beat the band.

This isn't that kind of TV movie. In the first place, it's adapted with some felicity by Ernest Kinoy from Gore Vidal's novel. The novel itself, while no masterpiece, wasn't bad and it stuck pretty close to historical facts. Vidal's characters, as he himself put it, went where they did and did what they did much as they did in real life. The novel had its amusing moments too, some inadvertent. Aboard a boat in Chesapeake Bay, Vidal has the weather worsening because "the wind was now coming from leeward." But at least he didn't turn Lincoln into a closet homosexual.

The battle scenes are a little perfunctory, probably because there wasn't as much money sunk into this production as Turner had available for the elephantine "Gettysburg." But the battle scenes aren't too important anyway. It's the outcome of the battles that count, and these are written into the dialog. It's enough to know that on the peninsula, General George McLellan was outmaneuvered by a Confederate force that he outnumbered ten to one. (The film doesn't mention it but the Rebs were led by a general who in civilian life had been a theatrical actor.) The film divides itself about equally between three narrative threads. (1) Lincoln's conduct of the Civil War. (2) Lincoln's political battles with his adversaries. And (3) Lincoln's life at home with his dysfunctional family.

And, boy, what a dysfunctional family it was. Abe and Mary Todd Lincoln were equally matched. She was manic and he was depressive. (I eschew the unnecessarily lengthy definitions.) Mary's impulsive and ill-judged buying sprees were symptomatic, as was Abe's severe depression as a young man. One of their three children suffered from Attention Deficit Disorder with Hyperactivity, which is made clear in the novel but not in the film. Furthermore, Mary, a firm abolitionist but not a radical one, came from a slave-owning family in a border state. Some of her relatives fought on the other side. Lincoln himself, a pragmatist, only freed some of the slaves with his Emancipation Proclamation, and he had to wait for a Union victory to announce it in order to keep the Republican congress in power. (Antietam -- some "victory".) Anyway, that's a lot of potential domestic conflict to explore.

Sam Waterston as Lincoln, Mary Tyler Moore as Mary Todd Lincoln, Richard Mulligan and Tom Brennan as cabinet members, Steven Culp as Lincoln's secretary, and Ruby Dee as Mary Lincoln's handmaiden pull it all together in a surprisingly effective way. There isn't a sour note in the bunch. Even the smaller roles, like Jeffrey DeMunn as Lincoln's former law partner, William Herndon, are well played.

The script is sprinkled with Lincoln's down-home expressions and his colorful analogies. McClellan has "a case of the slows." And if Little Mac isn't going to use his Army, Lincoln proposes to borrow it for a while and put it to work. When Lincoln suspects that the City Council in Baltimore is about to meet and may secede from the union, he throws the lot of them in jail and dispenses with habeus corpus. Can you imagine such a thing happening today? The movie leaves out a lot of Abe's bon mots but it's just as well because in the end, this is a tragic story, in more ways than one. Not only does the war kill more Americans than all our other wars combined, but of course Lincoln, perhaps our greatest president, is assassinated by a zealot. And Mary goes mad and is placed in a sanitarium for safe keeping by her own children. And there followed the destruction and humiliation of the South during Reconstruction, ensuring a lasting bitterness between two cultural regions that remained almost separate nations for the next hundred years.

I'm glad this movie was made -- and made as well as it was. Lincoln held the country together during its most perilous years. Some may claim his reputation has been inflated but it's hard to see how it could have been. The movie should be shown in high school history classes -- maybe college history classes too. In a poll about ten years ago, a substantial number of college freshman couldn't place the American Civil War in its proper half-century. What's worse, the percentage didn't improve among seniors.

This is NOT "unbelievable garbage", as some other critics, here, would say.

I am tired of those who would compare books to the movies made from them. For God's sake, a movie is INTERPRATIVE!!! When you read "The Nutcracker Suite", do you criticize the very beautiful ballet because EVERY WORD of the original book is not adhered to?

The PERFORMANCE given by Mr. Waterston is enough to launch this vehicle into greatness. He is simply wonderful.

You can HAVE Mary Tyler Moore. But Waterston is astonishing. And he always IS.

If people insist on criticizing films because they don't "match" the book from which they are taken, I suggest that they do NOT call themselves "film lovers".

This theory has been argued for decades, but still, people do not understand.

It is IMPOSSIBLE to put every thought, every line from a book, into a film. Please get used to this.

Thanks so much. -Studiojudio

I thought this movie was excellent. The acting was well-done, in my opinion. Mary Tyler Moore did a superb job in her role as Mary Todd Lincoln.

I don't know how much Gore Vidal's book, upon which this movie is based, reflects the truth about Abraham Lincoln. However, this movie shows a very different Abraham Lincoln than the American myth of "Honest Abe." Lincoln is portrayed as an ambitious politic, not above coaxing the facts put forth to the public in order to win votes for the new Republican Party, and who eventually becomes rather subdued and serious about life after a series of events unfold.

Anyone studying or interested in this period of American History or in Lincoln should give this movie a watching, if only for the perspectives given.

This is a nice piece of work, but far from being ideal. It was clear the filmmakers had little funds so that they used the re-enactors to show the battle scenes, and the color scheme in those differs a lot. But that is OK. The film itself is a bit too long and bit too unrealistic. Gore Vidal was a writer and he did bring a lot of fiction onto real events. But despite all this, Watterson and Tyler did their main parts well and that counts as a big plus. In general, not bad, but still, much weaker than many other Civil War films of the era. The movie pays a decent tribute to the life and sufferings of a real great man, but it often tends to drag along or slow down painfully quite too often. Recommended but with some caution

Sam Waterson and Mary Tyler Moore play Abraham and Mary Lincoln, 16th president of the United States and his first lady. A rather calculating politician from the mid west who invented a cracker-barrel image of himself that has passed into legend.

When John Ford and Henry Fonda made their Young Mr. Lincoln back in 1939, Ford allegedly told Fonda that he was not playing the Great Emancipator, but a hick country lawyer from New Salem. Waterson took some of that same advice in his performance. Lincoln shows just how much image management he used in making a bumpkin persona belie an incredible innate shrewdness. This was a man with so much confidence in his abilities to deal with people that he took in his two chief rivals William Seward and Salmon Chase in his cabinet as Secretaries of State and Treasury and worked with both.

Mary Tyler Moore gives one of her most memorable portrayals on the big and small screen as Mary Lincoln who was one woman with issues. She caused her patient husband no end of grief with her extravagance in the middle of the Civil War over her wardrobe and redecorating the White House. It all of course hid some incipient madness, lot of that brought on by the death of her son Willie.

Some meticulous research was done for this series as the personalities of Civil War Washington seem to have descended on the cast playing them. I particularly liked what James Gammon did with General Ulysses S. Grant a man who had two main characteristics, military genius and an occasional bad judgment in friends.

Lincoln's legend like JFK passed into our American scene with his assassination at the moment of his triumph holding the Union together. Forgetting the course the country would have taken had he lived and retired at the end of his second term in 1869, how would he be regarded today, as quite the mythic figure he is?

This mini-series should be well regarded and seen.

I really expected a better performance from Waterson. He looks too frazzled and the dialogue often rings false. Moore came across well as a woman losing it bit by bit.

I remember the massive hype for 2012's Lincoln, priming audiences and voters to give Daniel Day-Lewis another Oscar. The powers that be touted his performance, claiming no one had ever played Abraham Lincoln the way he had, and he was being realistic in his performance, speaking in a thin, rather high-pitched voice as Lincoln really did. They said watching the film was like seeing Lincoln peeled from a painting and come to life. Well, "they" clearly missed the television adaptation of Gore Vidal's bestselling Lincoln, starring Sam Waterston as the nation's most beloved president. In 2012, Daniel Day-Lewis just put on a beard. In 1988, Abraham Lincoln truly came to life.

I already love Sam Waterston and find him an incredibly talented actor, but if there's anyone out there who hasn't seen his movies, watching Lincoln will make you a life-long fan. His posture, mannerisms, walk, accent, and facial expressions are not his usual; it's clear from the first scene Sam studied everything about the president to make his performance as authentic as possible. While Hal Holbrook wins the look-a-like contest in his beloved Lincoln portrayals in North and South and the 1970s miniseries Lincoln, Sam emits an aura that makes you forget about Hal for a while. When you're watching Sam, you believe he was raised in a log cabin. You believe he's Honest Abe.

In addition to the historically accurate tidbits included in Ernest Kinoy's script, the production values of the film are wonderful. It doesn't feel at all like a 1980s TV movie. The costumes are beautiful, the production and art directions are extremely realistic, and the choice of using muted and dusty colors makes all the difference in the world. Usually, British movies have the market cornered on authentic lighting, but Joe Clayton, chief lighting technician for the film, did a fantastic job giving audiences a view of how things really looked during the Civil War.

Co-starring Mary Tyler Moore as the tragic figure Mary Todd Lincoln, Richard Mulligan as Secretary Seward, Steven Culp as Lincoln's secretary, Ruby Dee as Mary's dressmaker, David Leary as General McClellan, and John McMartin as Senator Chase, this three-hour tribute to Lincoln's presidency is extremely entertaining. Lamont Johnson won an Emmy for his direction, and Mary and Ruby were nominated for their performances, as were the hairstylist, art directors, costume designers, and film as a whole. Sam's performance was ignored, and when you watch the movie, you'll be as stumped as I am. Pair it with Ken Burns's The Civil War for a reprise of Sam Waterston's role, or with A House Divided to see Sam in another Civil War drama, but playing a villain!

Sam does a great job as Lincoln and I have to say I now picture this as being as Lincoln was.... Smart, witty and very quick and as he is portrayed in this film. I personally think this is Sam's finest work. The historical accuracy was well covered considering how much is lost with other shows and movies. Mary Tyler Moore did a great job and I think the film does the book justice which isn't always the case. I watch this at least once a year and I have to say it never fails to make me tear up a bit and make me feel glad to be an American. If you enjoy this period of our history I think you will enjoy it very much. There were important facts that were mentioned that are never in other movies or I think that most Americans don't even know. For example the fact that he had several losses close to him during his presidency. Covering many of the capricious fantasies Mary Todd had and much of the inner pain he endured while working through our countries issues. They cover much of his personality traits which are mostly ignored in similar movies. This is a great movie in this regard.

Though the performances are fine, it is my opinion that anyone who enjoyed this ridiculous simplification could not possibly have read Gore Vidal's book. The tone of Vidal's book is totally absent from this poorly shot and poorly written waste. I am amazed that Vidal allowed his name to be associated with it. Vidal's book is vibrant. It seems like the director did everything he could to deaden it. There are so many ridiculous scenes that have been updated to include modern mores that I would be surprised if the screenwriter did anything but read the book once and then rely on his grade school memories. The film is so badly shot that you almost never understand what is going on, because all important conversations take place in long shot and close-ups seem to be used at random. Every single battle sequence looks identical and uninteresting. READ THE BOOK! You are guaranteed a far more satisfying experience. It is the best book ever written on Lincoln and it is NOTHING like this film.

Thanks for the posted views on this excellent movie-made-for-television.

It's significant to note that the work is historically accurate in addition to being entertaining. The script, a little heavy at times, fills in a lot of background and detail. Other devices are more subtle. For example, Mary was fluent in French. In the movie, as their carriage approaches Ford's Theatre, Mary says she would like to visit Paris and then she slips into a single line of French. Similarly, Lincoln is seen lingering in the telegraph office. The Union maintained extensive telegraph networks, one of their secret and major advantages over Southern strategists.

The producers probably saved money by using video footage of reenactors at actual locations such as Antietam.