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Movie Review

Young Abe deserves ‘Better Angels’

Braydon Denney as a young Abe Lincoln in “The Better Angels.” Amplify Releasing

Had Terrence Malick taken a shot at making a Ken Burns movie, it would probably have turned out better than “The Better Angels,” A.J. Edwards’s humorless, pretentious black-and-white tone poem about a very young Abe Lincoln. Instead, Malick served as a producer on this earnest folly by his long-time collaborator and acolyte Edwards, which may explain why it resembles a rail-splitting variation on “The Tree of Life,” minus the dinosaurs and profundity.

It’s rural Indiana in 1817, where 8-year-old Abe lives in a world of rhapsodic black-and-white cinematography (Matthew J. Lloyd of “Robot & Frank”), with many shots of lovely women in long dresses gamboling in meadows, gangly barefoot youths in overalls horsing around in cornfields, and upwardly tilted shots of tall trees with sunlight glimmering through the leaves.

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In the embittered mean-dad role (see Brad Pitt in “Tree of Life”) is Jason Clarke as Abe’s Pa, Tom (Jason Clarke), a man quick with a switch and not too keen about having a son who’d rather read “Pilgrim’s Progress” or memorize all the speeches of Henry Clay than properly hoe a field or go turkey hunting. In truth, though, Abe, as played by newcomer Braydon Denney, isn’t especially likable. Sullen and wimpy, with barely a line of dialogue in the whole film, he shows no signs of future greatness beyond what other people say about him.

That includes the voice-over narrative (read by Hays Blankenship) taken from the recollections of Lincoln’s live-in cousin Dennis Hanks (played on screen by Cameron Williams), as recorded by the journalist Eleanor Atkinson when he was 90 for her book “The Boyhood of Abraham Lincoln.” These ramblings, however, add little insight, sounding instead like the trite non sequiturs muttered by Matthew McConaughey in his Lincoln (the car, not the president) TV commercials.

But Abe’s mother, Nancy (Brit Marling — one wonders how someone as self-admittedly homely as Lincoln could spring from parents resembling her and Clarke), and his stepmother, Sarah (Diane Kruger), make a stronger case for the boy’s potential. The two together reprise the Jessica Chastain role in “Tree of Life” as the sheltering, nurturing counterbalance to the brutish father. Both Nancy — deeply religious, ethereal, and clearly not long for this world — and Sarah, equally good-hearted but stronger-willed and more capable, respond to the boy with an empathy and admiration bordering on the Oedipal.

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This seraphic pair evoke more sympathy and interest than the cipher in whom they have such faith. Maybe Edwards underplays his hero in order to cut through the mythology that has grown up around him in literature and film and in books by people like Bill O’Reilly. But of the man who would write monumental speeches such as the one containing the movie’s title phrase, he offers not a glimpse of the better — or worse — angels of his nature.


Peter Keough can be reached at petervkeough@gmail.com.