I’m a bit of a history geek. For much of this year, when I’ve not been watching movies or reviewing television shows, I’ve been reading history books—presidential biographies, to be specific. And of all the movies that I’m looking forward to seeing come Oscar season, Lincoln, directed by Stephen Spielberg and starring Daniel Day-Lewis as the man in the stovepipe hat, is the one I’m most looking forward to.
So when the trailer for Lincoln rolled out a few days ago, I dutifully hopped on YouTube and watched.
There’s a lot to like here. Day-Lewis looks utterly convincing as our 16th (and, I’d argue, greatest) president. We get a sense of the tragic time he was in and the soaring call he followed in the midst of it.
But did his voice sound a little, um, off to you?
If so, you’re not the only one. From Slate’s Forrest Wickman:
Instead of the booming baritones we associate with our greatest orators (not to mention the most memorable Day-Lewis characters), Day-Lewis's voice was surprisingly high, folksy, even meek. Hollywood Elsewhere's Jeffrey Wells was quick to disapprove, complaining, "It's hard to describe what I was looking to hear, but this isn't it." Cinema Blend ran a poll, asking "Do you think Daniel Day-Lewis's Lincoln voice sounds weird?" Meanwhile, Jimmy Fallon responded in his own way: by replacing Day-Lewis' voice with the sound of Pee-wee Herman's.
But according to thee historians Wickman interviewed, Day-Lewis’ voice probably better reflects the real Lincoln than what most of us imagine when we “hear” the prez in our own minds. Apparently back in the day, people characterized Lincoln’s voice as “high-pitched” or even “whiny.” I’d imagine that, if we somehow were able to dig out a recording of Honest Abe actually speaking, most of us would say, “Why, that doesn’t sound like Lincoln at all!”
Let’s face it: Reality can be disappointing sometimes. We often expect our heroes (or villains, for that matter) to look and act a certain way, and when they don’t measure up to our imaginations, we can’t help but feeling a bit let down. Don’t most of us picture Moses looking like Charlton Heston—even though we know better? What if we learned that Genghis Khan was an overweight, balding guy who doted on his mother? We’ve gotten so used to the way Lincoln looks over the decades (the kindly eyes, the bewildering array of creases and wrinkles, the sagelike presence) that we forget how laughably ugly some contemporaries thought him. Union General George McClellan called him a “well-meaning baboon.”
When you think about it, Jesus was a victim of skewed expectations, too. When people of the day imagined their Messiah, they envisioned someone far different than the carpenter’s son they got. They might not have known exactly what they expected from the Christ, but Jesus wasn’t it.
I think God often did—and does—His work through the most surprising of vessels, these jars of clay that we are. The Bible is teeming with flawed, unremarkable people who wound up doing some pretty remarkable things. For me, Day-Lewis’ take on Lincoln’s voice is a strange reminder to me to look past the jar, to remember that it’s what’s inside that counts. It’s not the voice that matters as much as the words he spoke.
That said, I don’t think Day-Lewis’ portrayal will alter the voice of Lincoln that I hear in my own mind—the mellow, reflective voice of Sam Waterston in Ken Burns’ documentary The Civil War.
Now that’s the way the guy should sound.
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