Sheer American cragginess

By Tom Shone

Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance in Steven Spielberg’s "Lincoln" has the resonance of a tuning fork, cleanly struck. Set during the last days of the civil war, when Lincoln spotted a narrow sliver of opportunity through which to pass the 13th amendment, the film gives us one of the cinema’s best portraits of a working president: sagacious, weary, cunningly riding out forces beyond his control to achieve his desired end and free the slaves. Lit from above to bring out that bone structure, Day-Lewis is joined by the fissure-featured Tommy Lee Jones, playing a Republican radical, the weasel-faced John Hawkes, wrangling votes, and a confederate general played by Jackie Earle Haley, his face bearing the pockmarks of hate. It’s one pug-ugly film. The world would have to wait until the Rolling Stones’ current tour, 150 years later, to see anything matching 1860s America for sheer cragginess.

Spielberg’s casting instincts have always tended to the Rockwellian. Remember the assortment of hillbillies who rounded out the cast of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", some whiskery, some round, some as beaker-thin as figures in a Walker Evans photograph. Or the Krakow Jews in "Schindler’s List", in which differentiation—a pair of jug ears here, a disappearing chin there—singled a person out for salvation, according to the curious Darwinism of the movies. In Hollywood, faces are destiny. "Too much is written about how actors feel, too little about how they look," Kenneth Tynan said in his profile of Greta Garbo. He saw in "the broad ivory yoke of her shoulders" the build of a javelin thrower. "She walked obliquely, seeming to sidle even when she strode," and kissed "cupping her man’s head in both hands and seeming nearly to drink from it".