Begs the Question

Yesterday a dear friend of mine happened to be driving through town, and we decided to catch a film together. We saw Robert Redford's new movie 'The Conspirator,' the story of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and more specifically, the trial and execution of Mary Surratt. The film is spectacular, both thought-provoking and visually stunning with incredible cinematography. I love that it at least appears as though Redford used mostly natural light, and allowed the firelight from the candles and torches to blur and distort the way they naturally would on film. Also, the script was so nuanced and wonderful. Its speech was era-appropriate, more formalized than our speech is today, but not distracting or "antiquated." The actors all did a marvelous job with it; it was nice to see a good story told with good acting, simply and excellently--no explosions or car chases required.



But a line in the film made me wonder: is the assassination of Abraham Lincoln still the single greatest tragic and traumatic event in American history? Do we consider it separate from such horrific events as Pearl Harbor and September 11th because they are foreign nations/organizations attacking the U.S. Government? Or do we consider John Wilkes Booth and his conspirators a foreign organization because they affiliated themselves with the Confederate States of America?

It's so easy to distance ourselves from historical events. Untold horrors that emotionally and physically scarred our ancestors become words on a pages, mere statistics and pie charts. Good historians and, yes, good filmmakers work hard to remind us that these events were as real and as shocking to those living through them as ours are to us. America had been torn in half, with whole families slaughtered and farms destroyed.  Southern cities, in particular Richmond and Atlanta, were razed to the ground. An entire race had suddenly, wonderfully, been set free from legal bondage . . . but with little preparation for it, no real homes, and an unimaginable sense of uncertainty because surely they realized that emancipation on a piece of paper signed by one man does nothing to change the hearts of men. Soldiers returned home with what body parts they had left to them, having seen unspeakable horrors, people attempted to rebuild. And then the guiding light of the nation, that rallied the Union together, sought justice, and pieced together what was broken, was ripped away from a nation in one night. A nation that needed something positive to cling to. 

The assassination of Abraham Lincoln sent an already reeling nation into turmoil, and the film captures this so perfectly. This is the sort of tone and handling a historical event should have on film. 


**I can't embed the videos but anyone interested should check out the film's page on Youtube. It has some very interesting featurettes.