TV Review Redux: "The Real Abraham Lincoln" (National Geographic)

About a month ago, I reviewed a one-hour special on National Geographic channel called "The Real Abraham Lincoln. On Valentine's Day, NatGeo (as they seem to call themselves) unveiled a two-hour version. My polite description of the one-hour version was "disappointing." Two hours stripped away my reserve.

Awful. Dreadful. A complete waste of time. And I can't believe that National Geographic put their good name on it.

By the middle of the documentary, I felt bad for Harold Holzer, Richard Norton Smith, and Allan Guelzo, who offered interviews for the special. It's one thing to be misquoted. It's another for your quotes to be contextualized by mistakes, misinterpretations, and fraudulent historic dramatizations. How the filmmaker could take their good answers and come up with this documentary is beyond me.

The film, which hurries through the Lincoln biography so that it can focus a third of its time on the aftermath of the assassination, suffers from broad misconceptions about both its subject and its own scope. I stopped counting factual mistakes about 40 minutes into the film. It jumbles the chronology of Lincoln's life, but worse, it misunderstands the context for his life. The historical anachronism of the narration is stunning at times: once claiming that "[Lincoln] sees the railroad as a uniting force that can bind together a vast nation of immigrants in far-flung regions." Lincoln may have been a '60s liberal, but he was an 1860's liberal, not a 1960's liberal.

The less said about the life-action dramatizations, the better. Despite utilizing photographs to the contrary, this film always presents a bearded Lincoln, even in the scene where the 28-year-old moves to Springfield. A low budget might explain some problems, but the assassination scenes -- evidently really important to the writer/director -- are so inaccurate as to boggle the mind. The film shows the purported assassination attempt on Lincoln, but gets every detail wrong. The film shows the assassination, but so misrepresents the setting that one might think the Lincoln's were attending a private theater performance in a converted barn.

This is not a documentary about 'the real Abraham Lincoln,' at least it is not a documentary about the historical 16th president of the United States. Perhaps it's a documentary of Abraham Lincoln, the medical pitch-man. In any event, avoid this film like the plague.

The two-hour version of "The Real Abraham Lincoln" premiered on Saturday, February 14, 2009.

TV Review: "The Real Abraham Lincoln" (National Geographic documentary)

Last night, National Geographic Channel premiered their new one-hour "docudrama" about Lincoln, called "The Real Abraham Lincoln." (National Geographic has several programs called "The Real..." -- last night they followed "The Real Abraham Lincoln" with "The Real George Washington.") The program attempts to bring Lincoln to life by using an actor to portray him in several reconstructed scenes and offering occasional first-person narration.

Overall, the program is disappointing. One hour, less commercials, is too little time to present Lincoln's full cradle-to-grave biography. There were erratic jumps, complete with several misaligned images/dramatizations that did not mesh with the biographical narration. Worse, there were several misrepresentations in the film. Not only were the scenes with Lincoln dramatized, but the first-person narration was not constructed from Lincoln's own words. And to my ear they failed to sound much like Lincoln's own voice, offering too much detail about certain things in the wrong ways in the interest of quick personal disclosure. (While such personal disclosure is common on reality television, it was a very rare thing with Lincoln.)

Unlike some dramatizations, the actor playing Lincoln is very similar facially, and sometimes looks eerily like Lincoln must have in close-up. However, this impact is quickly lessened by the inadequate use of these dramatizations. In most of them, Lincoln appears alone on screen, or at most, in one scene, with a photographer and photographer's assistant. Lincoln walks alone through the Gettysburg National Cemetery. Lincoln rides alone on a train. Lincoln rides alone on horseback. Lincoln stands alone and looks out the window. The more I read about Lincoln's life, the clearer it becomes that he rarely had time to himself without people around him. Dramatizing the business and noise around Lincoln, from the war effort, to the public, to his family would have been interesting -- evidently it also would have been too expensive for this production.

By now, it feels like I'm picking on the documentary. And I haven't even mentioned the specific historical errors that creep into the narration, such as the locomotive steam engine appearing in Lincoln's life a good ten years too early and the later rather absurd suggestion that the north won the Civil War because they used their superior (and growing) railroad mileage effectively. Given that the Confederacy proved much more adept at using the railroad to move men and supplies quickly, this is certainly a dubious claim.

In the film, three authors/scholars are interviewed: K. M. Kostyal (who evidently writes young adult books for National Geographic), Richard Norton Smith, and Allan Guelzo. Of these, only Guelzo comes across very well, despite some clear quick edits in his comments. By the end, it seemed like listening to him talk for an hour (less commercials) would have been more helpful than this "docudrama."