Want Some Milkshake

Daniel Day-Lewis is famous for his dedication to a character.

The elusive Englishman’s method of acting, method acting, embeds him so deeply in the role he doesn’t turn it off when the cameras do. Shortly before shooting period piece “Gangs of New York,” onscreen nemesis Liam Neeson recalled him hitting the modern gym but as rugged 19^th-century street commander Bill “the Butcher” Cutting.

At the Bantam Cinema Saturday, as the two-time Oscar winner fielded questions from a rapt theater audience subsequent a showing of “Lincoln,” I was struck by how attainable and life-sized Mr. Day-Lewis was, and how much it resembled his spin on our 16^th president.

This is a man who intimidates with his command of the screen, even if as crippled cerebral palsy patient/poet Christy Brown, the “My Left Foot” role for which he won his first Academy Award. Meanwhile Lincoln is a sacrosanct figure in American history, a man we’ve come to believe was some kind of flesh-and-blood monument with a baritone voice that carried across both theaters of the States of America.

Both Mr. Day-Lewis and the Lincoln he portrayed betrayed those images. As a person more mellow than gregarious, he was sort of an everyman type uncomfortable being the professor.

“Just yell them out,” he said, seemingly overwhelmed by a crowd of raised hands.

As Lincoln, he wasn’t a looming and stoic figurehead but a good country boy with twang in his pipes and never far from his log cabin roots.

“Lucky for me there’s no recordings of him,” said Mr. Day-Lewis, who turned down the role when Steven Spielberg approached him about it eight years ago, believing that if his interpretation fell flat with American audiences he might be forced to leave the country.

No worries, “Lincoln” and Mr. Day-Lewis are already Oscar contenders, and deservingly so in this basically bloodless war movie not about the horrors of war but the decency of humanity.

However, I was disappointed by the great actor’s diplomacy when I asked him to compare Mr. Spielberg to the other great directors with whom he’s worked, such as Martin Scorsese (Gangs of New York) or PT Anderson (There Will Be Blood”) or Jim Sheridan (My Left Foot). He couldn’t muster a comparison as they were all so brilliant in their own way. But he was impressed by Mr. Spielberg’s childlike whimsy, and the fact that “he has the right approach to actors.”

Essentially, the director let Mr. Day-Lewis be Lincoln as he saw Lincoln. But in the village of Bantam Saturday, was he still doing that? Had he yet fully divorced himself from the character?

Probably not, he just saw a chance to finally play a role that better resembled himself.  Mr. Day-Lewis is clearly not the type to bludgeon somebody to death with a bowling pin after explaining the concept of drinking a milkshake from a distance with a really, really long straw.