Steven Spielberg's adaptation of Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals. Daniel Day-Lewis's third Best Actor Oscar. The four-month legislative struggle to pass the Thirteenth Amendment.
Washington, January-April 1865. The American Civil War is in its final months; Abraham Lincoln has been re-elected and faces an urgent legislative problem: the Thirteenth Amendment, which would abolish slavery throughout the United States, has passed the Senate but cannot, without significant additional vote-gathering, secure the two-thirds majority required in the House of Representatives. Lincoln, his cabinet (the 'team of rivals' including Secretary of State William Seward), and a small group of operatives work across four months to identify wavering House Democrats and persuade them to vote for the amendment.
The film tracks the legislative campaign in granular detail across roughly its first two hours. The final third covers the amendment's January 31 passage, Lincoln's subsequent meetings with Confederate emissaries at Hampton Roads, and the closing weeks of his life. The film closes with Lincoln's April 14 assassination at Ford's Theatre. The structural argument is that Lincoln's most-significant single achievement was the legislative work of passing the Thirteenth Amendment rather than the broader Civil War leadership his historical reputation typically centers.
Daniel Day-Lewis won Best Actor for Lincoln at the 2013 Academy Awards — his third in the category after My Left Foot (1989) and There Will Be Blood (2007). He is the only male performer in Academy history to win three Best Actor Oscars; only Frances McDormand has matched the three-win total in any acting category (Best Actress, 1996/2017/2020).
The performance is built on extensive preparatory research. Day-Lewis spent approximately a year in pre-production studying Lincoln's writings, speeches, and the surviving documentary record of his physical and vocal mannerisms. The specific voice he developed — higher-pitched than the conventional Lincoln stage-portrayal tradition, with a distinctly rural-Illinois cadence — was based on historical accounts suggesting Lincoln's actual voice was significantly higher than his physical stature would have implied. The performance has been studied at working acting programmes as an example of historical-figure-portrayal at the highest current level.
Lincoln's structural innovation is its commitment to legislative process as central dramatic material. The film could have been organised around Lincoln's broader Civil War leadership, his marriage to Mary Todd Lincoln, his historical significance as foundational American political figure. Spielberg and Tony Kushner instead chose to compress the dramatic focus to the four-month Thirteenth Amendment legislative campaign — a narrow historical period that the broader Lincoln biography would treat as one episode among many.
The choice produced one of the most-detailed legislative-procedural films in American cinema. The film tracks individual House Democrat votes by name. The political operatives (W.N. Bilbo, Robert Latham, Richard Schell) who conducted the vote-gathering are depicted in extensive detail. The specific procedural mechanics — the cloture rules, the absence/abstention strategies, the political horse-trading involving postmasterships and other federal appointments — receive screen time that conventional historical drama typically compresses. The result is an unusual film for mainstream commercial cinema: a legislative procedural with the dramatic intensity of a thriller.
The Tony Kushner screenplay is, by general working-screenwriter assessment, among the most-difficult historical-biography adaptations in recent American cinema. The challenge was that Doris Kearns Goodwin's source book Team of Rivals (2005) covers Lincoln's entire presidency across over 900 pages; the screenplay had to identify the specific compressed period and characters that would make the broader biographical material dramatic.
Kushner's specific solution was the legislative-procedural framing. The Thirteenth Amendment campaign provided a contained four-month period with clear stakes, identifiable characters, and a dramatic resolution. The broader Lincoln biographical material is delivered through smaller scenes within this framing — Lincoln's conversations with his wife, his cabinet, his sons. The structural compression allowed the film to operate as a focused legislative drama while also functioning as broader biographical drama. The screenplay was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay; the win went to Argo's Chris Terrio.