lincoln cranks er up

judging by the trailers, etc, daniel day-lewis has answered the question of what lincoln was doing at ford's theater: indulging his unnatural appetite for scenery. you may come out of the movie with a surprising understanding of and sympathy for john wilkes booth, which no doubt was speilberg's noble yet relentlessly didactic humanity-expanding purpose. as booth so often remarked, everybody who ever met that dude wanted to shoot him. i am an asshole of unfathomable power! so astonishing is day-lewis's performance that he literally becomes lincoln, who literally becomes daniel day-lewis, who literally becomes lincoln and so on; at each stage everything that is not sheer mannerism is progressively filtered out until voila pure essence of lincoln.