Abe Lincoln as you’ve never heard him
Daniel Day-Lewis, known as a picky film actor, on playing Abraham Lincoln
Charles McGrath
“Now he belongs to the ages,” Edwin Stanton, Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of war, said at the president’s deathbed. “And to the studios,” he could have added.
The latest in a long parade of screen Abes, coming right on the heels of Benjamin Walker’s ax-swinging, martial arts version in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, is Daniel Day-Lewis, who, though he grew up in England and Ireland and had to learn about Lincoln almost from scratch, plays the lead in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, which opens Friday.
Day-Lewis, 55, has already won two best actor Oscars, and his performance here, tender and soulful, convincingly weary and stoop-shouldered, will almost certainly earn him a nomination. He’s neither as zombified as Walter Huston in DW Griffith’s 1930 biopic Abraham Lincoln, nor as brash and self-assured as Henry Fonda in John Ford’s Young Mr Lincoln (1939), nor as stagy and ponderous as Raymond Massey, a year later, in Abe Lincoln in Illinois, in which he sounds, during the Lincoln-Douglas debates, a lot like the TV evangelist Harold Camping proclaiming the end of the world once more.
Tall and thin, with big hands and a long neck, Day-Lewis physically resembles Lincoln more nearly than many of his predecessors. Yet the first time Day-Lewis opens his mouth in the movie, he’s also a little startling. His Lincoln speaks not in Massey’s stentorian baritone, or in the echoing, ballpark-announcer tones of the Disneyland animatronic Lincoln, but in a voice that
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