When we heard that Daniel Day-Lewis was depicting Abraham Lincoln we knew the portrayal would be a brand of Lincoln we hadn't encountered before. And sure enough it was. Lewis's Lincoln, for which he won an academy award, was as complex and enigmatic as Ronald Reagan. All the myths about this leader as a selfless earnest creature blow up in the first 20 minutes of watching the film "Lincoln."
In body language, facial gestures, rhetorical tone and the content of conversations, the president we met was a brilliant politico, never out of his role of the man who had to save the nation. Totally manipulative, Lincoln used every tactic to get what he wanted. Those ranged from distracting his audience with funny stories to lying (unlike the boy who grew up to be President George Washington, he did tell a lie). He had a lawyer's cunning.
The challenge for the film industry is to find the next right role for Day-Lewis which is large enough for his talent.
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