Lincoln, review - Telegraph After that, the film retreats largely into bedrooms, offices, legislative chambers, and the claustrophobic world of intimate whispers and political arm-twisting which will eventually impose its will on a society in tumult. Day-Lewis's long-boned, craggy face, intermittently creasing into humorous dimples, takes him as close to the man himself as any actor could get without bearing the actual trace of oddity that sat on Lincoln's own features. His voice is distinctively light without being risible: he has shaped a character and not a caricature. His Lincoln pursues political goals by means of parables, digressions and illustrations (not everyone can stick it: at one point a rotund associate storms off with the exasperated prediction: "You're going to tell another story!"). But, by and large, it works. Honest Abe has a sly lawyer's talent for the earthy art of persuasion, if not always successfully in dealings with his wife (Sally Field), an erratically agitated lament in a corset. Melancholy and death encroaches all around him: in the casualties of war, and the recent demise of his son Willie. Tony Kushner's script is drenched in talk, and its twists demand close concentration, but it carries its own rewards: there is both grace and pungency in the dialogue. The film manages to say more about slavery with restraint than Tarantino's Django Unchained did with its flailing overkill (the occasional use here of the "n-word" arrives like a slap in the face). Lincoln, although a fervent abolitionist, is still working out what the American black population means to him, and he to them, crystallised here in a telling exchange with his wife's black seamstress and confidante Mrs Keckley (Gloria Reuben). Meanwhile, it says much for the presence of Day-Lewis that he defies upstaging from the barnstorming performance of Tommy Lee Jones as the radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens.