David James/Dreamworks and 20th Century Fox A scene from “Lincoln.”
8:43 p.m. | Updated Steven Spielberg has said he was hoping for a high degree of authenticity with “Lincoln,” and certainly
his production team worked hard
on their antiquing. But there is at least one place where the movie
diverts from the historical record, as a Connecticut congressman, Joe
Courtney, noted. In the film, two of Connecticut’s representatives are
shown voting against the 13th Amendment – voting, in effect, for
slavery to continue.
“How could congressmen from Connecticut — a
state that supported President Lincoln and lost thousands of her sons
fighting against slavery on the Union side of the Civil War — have been
on the wrong side of history?” Mr. Courtney wrote in a letter to Mr.
Spielberg and DreamWorks this week. After a check of the Congressional
Record, Mr. Courtney discovered, that in fact all four House members
from his state voted for the 13th Amendment. “Even in a delegation that
included both Democrats and Republicans, Connecticut provided a unified
front against slavery,” he writes.
Below the Line
Janusz Kaminski, the director of photography on “Lincoln,” discusses his work on the film.
In the letter, available
here,
Mr. Courtney, a Democrat and senior member of the Armed Services
Committee who represents the state’s 2nd district (covering Enfield, New
London and Old Saybrook), asks Mr. Spielberg for a correction.
“I
understand that artistic license will be taken and that some facts may
be blurred to make a story more compelling on the big screen,” he
writes, “but placing the state of Connecticut on the wrong side of the
historic and divisive fight over slavery is a distortion of easily
verifiable facts and an inaccuracy that should be acknowledged, and if
possible, corrected before ‘Lincoln’ is released on DVD.”
(Not to mention before it graces the Oscar stage.)
Team
“Lincoln” did not immediately reply to a request for comment, but the
Bagger will update you if Mr. Spielberg or the screenwriter Tony Kushner
weighs in to explain what they had against the Nutmeg State.
Update:
Is something other than the purity of the historical record – or the
sanctity of the Academy Awards – at play here? Over at Awards Daily,
Sasha Stone notes that none other than Ben Affleck
once campaigned for Mr. Courtney,
urging students to vote for him at an appearance at the University of
Connecticut in 2006. (Mr. Courtney won the election by 83 votes,
according to Salon.) And, Ms. Stone suggests, Mr. Courtney’s plea,
delivered in a public statement rather than a private message to the
filmmakers, may be as crass as politicking.
“A classy person would have simply sent an email to Tony Kushner but no, it’s Oscar season,”
she writes.
“Time to puff up like an angry peacock and defend the honor of your
state! Or maybe try to give back to someone who once helped you win an
election. Someone should tell him Affleck needs no help winning at this
point.”
It’s unclear what Mr. Courtney’s position on “Argo” is, but
in an interview with the Hartford Courant, the congressman notes that overall, he did like Mr. Spielberg’s movie.
“The
portrayal of Lincoln and Thaddeus Stevens is brilliant, and to the
extent that people maybe are thinking about how members voted, that’s a
healthy thing for our culture to be focused on — our history — as
opposed to the other content in movies,” he said.
He makes no
mention of Mr. Affleck (who has also campaigned for or donated to
Democratic candidates like Elizabeth Warren, Al Gore and John Kerry). In
a statement late on Thursday, Mr. Kushner defended his adapted
screenplay.
“We changed two of the delegation’s votes, and we made
up new names for the men casting those votes, so as not to ascribe any
actions to actual persons who didn’t perform them,” he writes. “In the
movie, the voting is also organized by state, which is not the practice
in the House. These alterations were made to clarify to the audience
the historical reality that the 13th Amendment passed by a very narrow
margin that wasn’t determined until the end of the vote. The closeness
of that vote and the means by which it came about was the story we
wanted to tell. In making changes to the voting sequence, we adhered to
time-honored and completely legitimate standards for the creation of
historical drama, which is what Lincoln is.”
Read his full statement after the jump.
Here is Mr. Kushner’s entire statement:
Rep.
Courtney is correct that the four members of the Connecticut delegation
voted for the amendment. We changed two of the delegation’s votes, and
we made up new names for the men casting those votes, so as not to
ascribe any actions to actual persons who didn’t perform them. In the
movie, the voting is also organized by state, which is not the practice
in the House. These alterations were made to clarify to the audience
the historical reality that the 13th Amendment passed by a very narrow
margin that wasn’t determined until the end of the vote. The closeness
of that vote and the means by which it came about was the story we
wanted to tell. In making changes to the voting sequence, we adhered to
time-honored and completely legitimate standards for the creation of
historical drama, which is what Lincoln is. I hope nobody is shocked to
learn that I also made up dialogue and imagined encounters and invented
characters.
I’m proud that Lincoln’s fidelity to and illumination
of history has been commended by many Lincoln scholars. But I
respectfully disagree with the congressman’s contention that accuracy in
every detail is “paramount” in a work of historical drama. Accuracy is
paramount in every detail of a work of history. Here’s my rule: Ask
yourself, “Did this thing happen?” If the answer is yes, then it’s
historical. Then ask, “Did this thing happen precisely this way?” If the
answer is yes, then it’s history; if the answer is no, not precisely
this way, then it’s historical drama. The 13th Amendment passed by a
two-vote margin in the House in January 1865 because President Lincoln
decided to push it through, using persuasion and patronage to switch the
votes of lame-duck Democrats, all the while fending off a serious offer
to negotiate peace from the South. None of the key moments of that
story — the overarching story our film tells — are altered. Beyond that,
if the distinction between history and historical fiction doesn’t
matter, I don’t understand why anyone bothers with historical fiction at
all.
I’m sad to learn that Representative Courtney feels
Connecticut has been defamed. It hasn’t been. The people of Connecticut
made the same terrible sacrifices as every other state in the Union, but
the state’s political landscape was a complicated affair. The
congressman is incorrect in saying that the state was “solidly”
pro-Lincoln. Lincoln received 51.4 percent of the Connecticut vote in
the 1864 election, the same kind of narrow support he received in New
York and New Jersey. As Connecticut Civil War historian Matthew
Warshauer has pointed out, “The broader context of Connecticut’s history
doesn’t reflect what Courtney had said in his letter. The point is we
weren’t unified against slavery.” We didn’t dig into this tangled
regional history in Lincoln because a feature-length dramatic film
obviously cannot accommodate the story of every state, and more to the
point, because that’s not what the movie was about.
I’m sorry if
anyone in Connecticut felt insulted by these 15 seconds of the movie,
although issuing a Congressional press release startlingly headlined
“Before The Oscars …” seems a rather flamboyant way to make that known.
I’m deeply heartened that the vast majority of moviegoers seem to have
understood that this is a dramatic film and not an attack on their home
state.