By Matthew Ralph

It didn’t quite meet the goal of 200 and in fact failed to even crack triple digits, but an ambitious attempt to stage a world record breaking gathering of Abraham Lincoln presenters in downtown Louisville earlier this week was still effectively quirky, bizarre and even a bit creepy.

While there were some with so-so costumes, several of the Lincolns were more or less what I imagine the 16th president would have been like on the stump in the run-up to the election. Within five minutes of my arriving, three Lincolns had gracefully shaken my hand and made the kind of small talk befitting of a 19th century gentleman before moving on to work the rest of the crowd waiting for a film about, what else, but people who take seriously the business of portraying Lincoln.

Unfortunately, the crowd wasn’t very presidential or even low budget film festival, but the 30 or so Lincolns who showed were still larger than life and enough of an oddity to draw attention from bystanders walking or driving by. The Lincoln fever was also enough to get me to put on a plastic top hat and recite the first line of the Gettysburg address with a group of other faux-Lincoln presenters.

The film, which screened after the failed record attempt, is a documentary called Being Lincoln…Men With Hats that tells the story of a few of some 160 hardcore Lincoln presenters in 38 U.S. states who know the man with his face on the penny and the five-dollar pretty much inside out. The irony of going to the theater with 30 men dressed as Lincoln wasn’t lost on the crowd even if the joke about it I tried to make fell flat like it did so many times in the film. Jokes disguised as warnings about going to the theater are apparently so prevelant with Lincoln presenters that the film’s director, Elvis Wilson, included a VH1 style “Warning: Joke in progress” pop-up each time a Lincoln presenter had to endure one in the film.

After the first pop-up, I realized how lame my attempt at humor was. I was totally that guy to the Lincoln presenters whose top hats were obstructing my view of the movie about them. Fortunately, the director, who was sitting on my row, had arrived after my big mouth had already spoken.

My own embarassment aside, the Lincoln presenter’s interaction with the public in the film provided the most compelling and surprising parts of the documentary. During an extended montage of footage of one presenter walking the party district of Nashville, we see everything from break dancers thanking him for the emancipation proclamation and sorority girls saying how hot he is to drunken red necks pretending to shoot him, even drunker dudes making lame jokes and a bluegrass band bringing him on stage and playing hail to the chief. Also in the film, one of the presenters who shook my hand before the movie started visits a school and unintentionally tricks several kids into thinking he is really Abe Lincoln.

Strange interactions with the public only make up a small part of a film that tells its story through goofy graphics, interviews with a pretentious academic, quirky and often heartfelt interviews of several presenters, footage of an annual gathering of presenters and a storyline of a guy preparing for his first lookalike contest. Though it remains light-hearted through much of the film, there is an undercurrent of emotion and biographical presentation of the real Lincoln peppered throughout that is perhaps as open to interpretation as the most — to quote a term used in the film — “biographied” American of all time.

This perhaps bubbles to the surface most when the topic of racism is discussed. Since the presenters, who are specific to point out that they are not impersonators, go through great lengths to embody Lincoln it is perhaps fitting, as sad as it is, that they face critics who, as one presenter put it, think the Civil War is still being fought. None had stories of serious death threats being made, but there were anecdotes relayed of criticisms hurled seemingly based solely on Lincoln’s involvement with ending slavery in the U.S.

There also appears to be a slight undercurrent of religious fervor and political ideology communicated by some of the presenters, particularly in one that visits a church group to talk about Lincoln’s beliefs and another who sees presenting Lincoln as an opportunity to talk about God and old-fashioned values in public schools.

Watching these presenters act on camera, particularly in a montage toward the end of the film where they recite the Gettysburg Address, it’s hard not to be touched all over again by Lincoln’s story, even if some of the ways he is portrayed by his biggest fans of the 21st century fall into the territory of mythical hero worship. Personally, I was most fascinated by the picture of Lincoln with a spikey punk rock hairdo and the biographical tidbit about how he wasn’t really into combing his hair (I’ve already used it to explain to my wife why my hair was a mess).

Generally speaking, Being Lincoln was an enjoyable film that proved to be more than just another of the growing number of documentaries about particular fringe groups. In a roundabout way, it tells the story of our country and provides a much needed escape from the current political realities facing our great nation and an election campaign that has arguably been one of the ugliest and most divisive in history. The unfortunate reality that for me set in only after getting a sticker for the movie modeled after the ubiquitous white W. on a black square stickers (replaced by an L.) is that our current president and probably even his successor will likely not be inspiring anywhere near the devotion and reverance in future generations given to No. 16.

Really, it’s a shame more Lincolns didn’t show up. Two-hundred people in black top hats representing the number of years that have passed since little Abe was born in a log cabin in Kentucky would have been an incredible site to behold.

“Being Lincoln…Men With Hats” was the opening film of the first Derby City Film Festival. The festival runs through Oct. 12 at the Louisville Memorial Auditorium. For more information, visit www.derbycityfilmfest.com.