I’ve been saying for years that Steven Spielberg will be out of his depth with the Lincoln movie, which he’ll soon begin directing in the Richmond area. He’s basically a Tintin/Raiders/E.T./Catch Me if You Can/Amistad/Robopocalypse type of guy, and he knows that we know this. And leopards don’t change their spots.

But at least this forthcoming Civil War drama have Daniel Day Lewis‘s performance as Abraham Lincoln, which we all know will be some kind of thrilling-exceptional-historic. It can’t not be.

Spielberg has told the Orlando Sentinel‘s Roger Moore that “the movie will be purposely coming out after next year’s election” — i.e., sometime in December 2012 — because he doesn’t “want it to become political fodder.”

What is he talking about? What’s wrong with noting historical-political parallels between the past and the present? How is that a negative? If Paul Thomas Anderson or Oliver Stone or David Fincher were directing Lincoln, would any of them say they don’t want anyone pointing to political parallels?

This indicates Spielberg’s general discomfort with political subject matter. He’s always defaulted to sentiment and emotion. The man makes movies in order to swell hearts.

Never forget that Spielberg sent Tom Cruise‘s teenage son into a hopeless battlefield encounter with the Martians in War of the Worlds…and let him live. And then threw in Gene Barry and Ann Robinson, costars of the original War of the Worlds, as the kid’s grandparents.

“We’re basing [the film] on Doris Kearns Goodwin‘s book, ‘Team of Rivals,'” Spielberg said, “but we’re only focusing on the last four months of Abraham Lincoln‘s life.” In other words, it’s not really based on Goodwin’s book but about the closing chapter of the Civil War and the very end of Lincoln’s saga.

Six years ago Liam Neeson told me the film would span from Lincoln’s inauguration to assassination. Then it was reported that Tony Kushner ‘s script would begin with the Emancipation Proclamation and end with Lincoln’s death. Now it’s down to Lincoln’s final 120 days of life — December 1864 to April 1865.

Lincoln “is “not a battlefield movie,” Spielberg told Smith. “There are battles in it, and being in Virginia, we have access to those historic battlefields. It is really a movie about the great work Abraham Lincoln did in the last months of his life.”

Tomas Alfredson‘s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Focus Features, 12.9) is one dense opaque stew. And so crisply realized. Wait…what does that mean, “crisply realized”? Crisp like a Saltine or Heinz cracker? I’d better start over and just call it simultaneously ambiguous and clean and masterful in the manner of a slowed-down pulse. It’s a film that you need to see at least twice — once to sit in your seat and go “aaahh, yes…so adult and complex and underemphasized” and a second time to pay even closer attention and tie up the loose ends.

It’s a furrowed-brow spy film, cautious and probing and undashing, submerged in a world of half-clues and telling looks and indications…London fog and brain matter and ’70s technology…it’s just atmospherically dead-on. And that’s certainly pleasurable in itself.

I don’t want to get into this too deeply because the film doesn’t open for another nine or ten weeks but I can at least say that Gary Oldman‘s performance as George Smiley has to be considered…no, trumpeted as Best Actor-worthy. I’ve read a couple of reviews that claim he’s not aping Alec Guinness‘s performance as Smiley in the 1979 British miniseries version. Well, he does seem to be doing that. To me, at least. Oldman barely moves in this thing, but oh, how he delivers! The man is an absolute pleasure just to watch…to simply regard. The stillness of him is sublime.

Oldman is doing the old minimalist two-step, of course, but in a more expressive way than, say, Glenn Close in Albert Nobbs. Her character is extremely cautious and guarded in order to hide her true identity. Oldman’s Smiley isn’t hiding himself in the slightest, but his manner is naturally circumspect and cerebral and analytical. As a matter of professional purpose and demeanor he’s chosen to be this way, and there’s something gassy about this from an audience perspective.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is cut from the same cloth as Martin Ritt‘s The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. The story is about treachery and betrayal and misdirection, but more profoundly about the political murk and tedium of British civil-service submission. A hunt for a traitor, for traces of memory. A movie about staffers and freelancers and gray hair, gray faces, Burberry overcoats, endless cigarettes and glasses of whiskey. I’ve read the John LeCarre book and seen the Guinness version so I was able to stay with the plot particulars and keep it more or less together in my head, but others….aah, let’s wait until December.

So it’s a fine Le Carre immersion but….how to put this? It feels hermetic. I somehow never got the sense that the boys of MI6 and MI5 are all that heavily connected to the government or to great power, or that they really are “on the front lines against the Soviets,” as Ciaran Hinds proclaims early on. It’s like their world is entirely cut off from everything else. Like the action is all taking place in a large asylum.

And yet it didn’t lose me for a second. LeCarre stories have always been my cup of tea. I love spook stuff. And I can’t stop humming over Oldman’s underplaying & immaculate restraint. What a jewel of a performance. And Tom Hardy as Ricky Tarr! I have to say that the finale felt a bit anticlimactic on some level. I have three or four other gripes, actually, but there’s plenty of time. This is such a fine and subtle film — a kind of pleasure cruise for adults who eat this shit up. It’s amazing that it was made for theatrical, but glad it was made. Have I said “Hail Oldman!”?

Thanks to Focus Features for allowing me to see Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy yesterday evening, and thus sparing me the cost and trouble of flying to London and all that. I was apparently the only one seeing it in Manhattan. The spy drama was also shown to others on the West Coast so yesterday was obviously the day. Thanks very much.

“From an awards-season perspective, Christopher Plummer has everything going for him,” Grantland‘s Mark Harris observes. “He has been chronically underrecognized by Academy voters — it’s still inexplicable to me that he wasn’t nominated for his brilliantly acidic portrayal of Mike Wallace in The Insider. And his second-billed (but really supporting) role in Beginners feels laboratory-designed for awards:

“Getting to play a stoic gay man who doesn’t come out until he’s 75 and then learns he’s dying of cancer is a little like bowling a strike after getting spotted nine pins, which makes the fact that Plummer’s portrayal is so understated and simple the true mark of his talent.”

Harris goes on to say that Plummer’s “chewy” supporting role coming up in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo as well as Barrymore, the one-man stage performance film that just played in Toronto, may present complications. No, they won’t. As I wrote a week ago, they’ll be strictly backup — i.e., momentum fuel — for Beginners.

Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone and I recorded our latest Oscar Poker two days ago (i.e., Sunday morning) as I sat in a friend’s home — a small beachside cottage in Fairfield, Connecticut. Here’s a non-iTunes, stand-alone link.

I’m sorry, but this is worth checking out also.

The Drive soundtrack is rocketing up the iTunes charts, says Hollywood Reporter‘s Lindsay Powers. It was at #7 over the weekend and at #5 this morning. Some Twitter guy reportedly wrote that “listening to the Drive soundtrack actually makes you 40% cooler than you were before,” etc. The truth? Even I have downloaded College’s “A Real Hero.” The album is purchasable on iTunes for $9.99 or can be bought on CD on 9.27.

Here’s to Sony Classics‘ Michael Barker and Tom Bernard and their ongoing celebration of the company’s 20th anniversary, which more or less kicked off in Toronto. I’ve been dealing with them since the early ’90s. As far as I’m concerned there’s no team with a more intelligent or well-measured approach, and no finer brand in the indie realm (dependent or otherwise). I especially love Barker-Bernard for their long alliance with Pedro Almodovar.

David Poland‘s video interview works pretty well, I think. I don’t have any Jihadist qualms about posting his stuff, so here it is and best wishes to Sony Classics — a company that has been good to me all along.

A German Bluray (Region 2) of William Wellman‘s The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) has been out since late August. A bit on the nose at times, but one of Wellman’s finest. Henry Fonda, Dana Andrews, Harry Morgan and Anthony Quinn gave career-best performances. Criterion would have done better to issue a Bluray of this (especially in view of Arthur C. Miller‘s moody, Gregg Toland-like cinematography) than that atrocious grainstorm Stageocach.

So when’s the Region 1 Bluray of this 20th Century Fox classic coming out, Schawn Belston or James Finn? What other black and white westerns should be on Bluray? Red River, High Noon, The Gunfighter and what else?

Netflix co-founder and CEO Reed Hastings has announced that Netflix’s DVD-by-mail service will, “in a few weeks,” be re-named Qwikster while the movie-streaming service will retain the Netflix name. The “qwik,” of course, is a variation of the “quik” in Nestle’s Quik, which I subsisted on for years as a kid. So it’s that blended with Flixter.

Last night Albert Nobbs star-producer Glenn Close was handed the San Sebastian Film Festival’s Donostia Award, which was basically a tribute to her long career. This will be the general Academy thinking or impetus if she’s nominated for a Best Actress Oscar early next year. Nobbs director Rodrigo Garcia presented the award during a ceremony in Donosta-San Sebastian‘s Kursaal Auditorium.