Documentary illuminates Abe Lincoln’s darker side

Published 9:00 pm Friday, January 13, 2006

Vikram Jayanti wanted to call his portrait of the nation’s 16th president “The Darkness of Abraham Lincoln.”

In fact, he said, that was the production’s working title for nearly three years. Rather than create a biographical documentary, he planned to show how one man “transcended depression and turned it into light.”

Jayanti’s film airs under a simpler title, “Lincoln,” but it still focuses on the traumas the president endured over his lifetime, ending with a war that claimed more American lives – including his own – than any other.

The New York-born filmmaker acknowledged that his own struggle with depression informs the film. “Our model of depression, as a society, is that you’re broken and lost if you’re depressed,” Jayanti said. “Here’s a man who, because of his depression, becomes a transcendent human being.”

In a film he saw as youth, Jayanti said, “Charlie Chaplin says, ‘Dictators free themselves, but they enslave the world.’ Well, Lincoln freed himself by freeing the slaves.”

Andrew Solomon, author of “The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression,” and one of many featured experts, agrees: “The way some people distract themselves (from depression) is by functioning brilliantly and with a certain intrinsic genius, and so for Lincoln … it happens to have been a wonderfully productive way of running away from it.”

Lincoln, Jayanti said, was “a very calculating guy, a bare-knuckled warrior. Had he lived, I think he was the only person who could have reintegrated the South in a wholesome way.”

The History Channel commissioned the film in January 2003, but Jayanti spent more than a year doing research and thinking about how to portray Lincoln. He decided to go beyond the marble statuary and yellowed photos and explore the man’s emotions and what drove him.

Lincoln, an up-by-the-bootstraps frontiersman, left no autobiography. But Jayanti found what Carl Lindahl, History Channel’s vice president for historical programming, called “a lot of new scholarship about Lincoln.” The voices of those scholars and writers, rather than that of a narrator, carry Lincoln’s story. None of the actors speaks lines.

“Each person I interviewed at some point wept, they feel Lincoln’s life so personally,” Jayanti said. “I wanted the film to work not in the language of information, but in the language of emotions.”

Jayanti, who produced “The Christmas Truce” for History in 2002 and won the 1997 Oscar for best feature documentary for “When We Were Kings,” called this “a very ambitious film.”

“A lot of it is done with cinema effect – things are a bit hallucinatory, the action is smeared across the screen,” he said.

The film begins with melodramatic and disconcerting close-ups of an actor’s eyes, the sound of a ticking clock and the assertion that “in his final days, Lincoln dreams of his own assassination.” (As Solomon remarks in the film: “When you’re depressed, you have dreams … about the end of everything.”)

The film explores the emotional trauma that may have resulted in Lincoln’s depression and his proclivity to hide his feelings. Experts discuss his fear that he might have contracted syphilis from prostitutes, and whether he had homosexual relationships.

“I was desperately concerned not to do a hatchet job on Lincoln,” Jayanti said. “You can do a ‘gotcha’ on anyone, but Lincoln is bigger and better than that. What I was trying to do is to make Lincoln more human. That’s not available if he’s made of marble.”