Miscasting, and More

Rating: 5/10 (28 April 2013)

Daniel Day-Lewis was not the right man for this job. Lincoln was a president and a leader. That role does not call for a wimpy, pleading goofball, seemingly in his 70s, scrabbling around on his knees, relating ineffective and evidently tangential tales. The "astute politician" alleged by e.g., Wikipedia often seems rather to be a thin-voiced weakling and a shaky, emotional beggar devoid of gravitas.
But maybe casting wasn't the entire issue -- as in, for example, the haunting music behind scenes in which "Lincoln" fails to say anything firmly convincing: when does that get tiresome? Or how about the scene in which Lincoln is a bystander while his wife holds forth: is that a plausible representation of a formal reception at the Lincoln White House? Is this movie really about Lincoln, or is it rather a 2012 yuppie revisitation of a nice dad who somehow made it to the big time? It's a rhetorical question, as Tommy Lee Jones (nicely cast) might put it: this is, after all, a Dreamworks film.