‘Lincoln’ on Netflix: Daniel Day-Lewis’s Masterpiece is the Perfect Presidents’ Day Movie

Hi, hello, I hear you’re looking for a Presidents’ Day movie on Netflix to watch. Great news: Lincoln is streaming on Netflix right now, and it’s a masterpiece of a film that is also an essential history lesson on arguably the greatest American president who ever lived.

Presidents’ Day the federal holiday is officially known as Washington’s Birthday and was originally intended to celebrate only the first president of the United States, who was born on February 22, 1732. Then some people realized that Abraham Lincoln’s birthday—February 12, 1809—was around the same time and that maybe we should honor the president who ended slavery as well as the one who owned slaves. Most states now use the holiday to celebrate both men. Seeing as there are not any Oscar-nominated movies about George Washington currently streaming on Netflix, I really think Lincoln is your best bet today.

Here’s the thing about the 2012 film Lincoln: It’s great. I mean, it’s a Tony Kushner screenplay, directed by Steven Spielberg, starring Daniel Day-Lewis. Of course it’s great! It won Day-Lewis the Oscar for Best Actor and snagged 11 nominations on top of that. But what Lincoln did so well—and what makes the film such a perfect watch for today’s holiday—is illustrate exactly how long and how arduous the road to one of our country’s most important pieces of legislation really was.

The focus of Lincoln is not on the sixteenth president’s childhood, election, or Civil War victory, but solely on his fight to pass the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery in the United States. It was not, as we see, an easy task. Lincoln’s fellow Republicans warned him it was a doomed mission. Even if every Republican congressman voted yes, Lincoln would still need 20 Democratic congressmen—many of whom represented Southern states—to vote in his favor. The president believed he could get those votes from the Democrats who had recently lost re-election campaigns and therefore could vote for what they believed, rather than for what they thought would get them re-elected. (Sound familiar?)

What follows is a high-stakes and carefully-played game of political chess. President Lincoln must thread the needle of enlisting support from key moderates without upsetting the radicals while trying to restore peace with the Confederates without compromising on abolition. Spoiler alert: Lincoln gets the amendment ratified by the states, and changes the fate of the country. Three days later, he was shot and murdered.

There’s a laundry list of great actors filtering in and out of this film, including Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln, Jared Harris as Ulysses S. Grant, Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddeus Stevens, Adam Driver as Samuel Beckwith, Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Robert Todd Lincoln, David Strathairn as William H. Seward, and so many more. It’s arguably Day-Lewis’s greatest ever performance. And you’ll come away from it with new-found awe for the way the 16th president was able to irrevocably change the country for the better at a time when it was literally split in two. It might give you hope that maybe someday, something like that can be done again. Or maybe it will just make you realize democracy has been broken for almost two centuries. Either way.

Watch Lincoln on Netflix