National Post (National Edition)
Colby Cosh on the long shadow of Daniel Day-Lewis.
Sir Daniel Day-Lewis has announced, in his typical terse and publicity-averse fashion, that he is retiring from acting. Normally, when an actor makes such an announcement, the proper course of action is to ignore it. But Day-Lewis is pretty famous for not doing anything UNseriously, and is even more famous for treating the craft of acting — an activity with an inherent trace of unseriousness — as the most serious matter in the universe. He has harmed and embarrassed himself so often with method-acting exploits that he may be retiring at age 60 to give himself a chance of reaching 80.
Any cinema-goer is bound to wish Day-Lewis well, but one wonders if we would know he had retired if he did not make a point of saying so. He has not appeared in a movie since 2012’s Lincoln, and he abandoned the stage for good 28 years ago after having a public meltdown while playing Hamlet at the National.
He leaves behind an odd filmography, considering that he is widely considered the best actor alive (assuming the sexes are divided Oscar-fashion and Meryl is on the other side of the fence). His Oscar performances in There Will Be Blood and Lincoln loom large, as does the irresistible Gangs of New York. But a Day-Lewis film festival shown in chronological order would, I am afraid, involve periods of dreariness. “Which IRA movie is this again?”
If his forthcoming Phantom Thread is the last we see of him, I will always remain particularly grateful for his Lincoln. By “Lincoln” I do not so much mean the movie. Abraham Lincoln is a unique challenge for an actor. He is a figure of whom every viewer carries an unusually strong pre-existing mental image: as a character he has his own acting tradition. Lincoln gave speeches almost anyone can quote at some length. If you are at all interested in American history, you have imagined being at the scene of the Gettysburg Address or of a Lincoln-Douglas debate.
But Lincoln’s home is the 19th century, and that makes things awkward. Play Julius Caesar or William Shakespeare in a movie and you have an almost obscene amount of freedom to interpret. Nobody can really argue with you about what Jesus looked like. With a 20th-century figure, you have the opposite advantage. If you want to pretend to be Churchill there are hundreds of hours of voice recording and film footage you can study — abundant material from most any segment of his life. You can start out doing a mere Churchill impression and build it up into something deeper (though most don’t).
In portraying Lincoln, an actor is confined by very extensive documentation of his life, personality, and appearance, yet is, at the same time, without obvious help in the form of a living audio or video record. There is so much Lincolniana in existence that it borders on the comic. (For Lincoln’s 150th birthday in 1959, the U.S. government commissioned an official chronology of Lincoln’s life, detailed enough to be called “Lincoln Day-By-Day.” It is still updated, but a while ago they stopped fighting logic and officially renamed it “The Lincoln Log”.) If you get a tiny detail wrong in a depiction of Lincoln, some jerk will notice. There are hundreds of professional scholars devoted mostly to Lincoln, and thousands of amateurs, or tens of thousands, who make him a major avocation.
Lincoln’s voice is an especially formidable aspect of the challenge. There’s unanimous agreement in the sources that Lincoln, despite enormous size and strength, had a high, shrill voice. Friends, enemies, and the indifferent remarked on this. The word “shrill” recurs. 19thcentury orators who survived long enough to be recorded spoke in a pretty high register anyway, and Lincoln’s speaking voice must have been higher still.
Ordinary actors ought to know that Lincoln should not be a baritone, but the risk of trying anything else must be terrifying. How do you put a high, reedy voice in the mouth of a god? Day-Lewis found a completely convincing solution, although some people complained even as they acknowledged that his Lincoln was ultracompelling, or that his choice of voice register was historically correct. If Day-Lewis’s Lincoln voice had been defensible to historians, but not emotionally credible to Americans as a portrayal, the money spent on the movie would have gone up in a bonfire of laughter, along with Day-Lewis’s reputation.
This was something nobody else could do for Day-Lewis. He may have had as many researchers and coaches working with him as any cinema actor ever, but in the end an actor is alone in front of the camera. Who else could have been counted on to pull it off? What other actor has possessed the absurd degree of dedication, the insane, meticulous studiousness? He has equipped our imaginations, forever, with a realistic, genuine, legitimate Abraham Lincoln — a thing I never expected to see.