As part of the magazine's Hollywood Issue, writers riff on the movies of 2012. Our portfolio in the magazine contains all women, but there are a few performances by men worth celebrating as well. Here's one of this year's memorable men:
We hear Abraham Lincoln before we see his face. His voice is an octave higher than we might expect. It's also wheezy — or is it raspy? It's weary, certainly, and also less serious and smaller than the great voice you might imagine proclaiming emancipation or addressing Gettysburg. Whatever you expected of Daniel Day-Lewis in "Lincoln," this peculiar, small instrument of a voice is probably not it.
Yet his odd delivery is a brilliant piece of misdirection, so confounding that, by the time you see them, you barely register the iconic beard and stovepipe hat, themselves so familiar and so primed to seem campy, following a long history of school plays and a certain recent vampire-hunter flick. Instead, you focus on that strange, small voice, until any fear that this performance would be some sort of animatronic Epcot-style Oscar-bait Abe has entirely disappeared.
In "Lincoln," the screenwriter Tony Kushner and the director Steven Spielberg have built a sophisticated argument for political pragmatism: The greatest speechwriter in presidential history is able to push through the 13th Amendment and abolish slavery without delivering a single speech on the subject himself. Instead, he relies on back-room politicking, legal rule-bending, crass patronage, and, above all, temperance in the service of radicalism — and that same, calculated temperance is at the soul of Day-Lewis's astonishing performance.
"I'm used to going a deliberate pace," says the president, early in the film, and you feel that deliberation in the slow shuffle of Day-Lewis's steps and the careful modulation of his voice. And despite his magnetism, he is too odd for archetypes: a genius weirdo, gawky and halting, oblivious at times, prone to telling long tales at the wrong moment, and almost serenely still when lost in thought. Maybe this is the quality that makes Day-Lewis arguably our greatest actor. (An Oscar for "Lincoln" would be his third win as best actor, something no man has ever done.) He can sustain what others cannot: an overwhelming performance without catharsis, intensity without relief.
Check back on Friday for a photo portfolio of celebrities featured in the Hollywood Issue.
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