Lincoln

Providing an in-depth warm yet demanding account of the overt and back room executive and legislative steps taken to both legally abolish slavery and end the American Civil War, even though the contemporaneous achievement of both goals seemed unattainable, Steven Spielberg's Lincoln avuncularly yet sternly examines a pivotal point in American history and the roles played by many of its leading persons.

It's very practicable.

It lays out the complicated dynamics of the Republican Party as it was structured with Abraham Lincoln at the helm during his 2nd term, and, while often employing an elevated vocabulary, patiently divides the party into collaboratively oppositional groups whose interests each need to be moderately assuaged.

Thus, differing internal ideological commitments and approaches to the same set of principles are coherently represented by sensible counterintuitive arguments.

Expediency and opportunism become necessary factors due to the inextricable contingencies of their political matrix.

I have no idea how closely the actions depicted in this film match generally agreed upon historical realities within prominent objective canonical yet malleable enclaves, but the film did remind me that back when I cared about trivia and avidly watched Jeopardy!, I could rarely knowingly answer its myriad American Civil War questions, and wanted to learn more about it.

Lincoln's (Daniel Day Lewis) exceptional gifts for finding applicable amusing pedagogical anecdotes capable of being pleasantly yet instructively presented to whomever his audience happened to be affably ties things together.

Trying to make the passage of an amendment into a dramatic film was a great idea.

Being able to vote for the people who pass such amendments is a right that was/is vehemently fought for.

If you're jaded about the results of your voting, which everyone is at some point, Spielberg's Lincoln does exemplify how difficult it can be to coordinate the passage of legislation, which will often (probably always) contain cumbersome particulars which are themselves the product of advanced democratic pluralities, who have progressed in varying degrees, over the centuries.