Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln, and why Steven Spielberg made a movie that will never be called great.

The last way I should start my first blog post back in the cyber world is with an insult to Daniel Day-Lewis. So I won't.
Not that it would make sense anyway -- the man was amazing in Lincoln.

Good. Not great.

What you're about to read (hopefully all the way through) is a brief thought on why everything around Daniel Day-Lewis is what made Lincoln fail. Or fail, at least, in its quest to become one of the greatest films ever made.
The problem with Lincoln, simply put, is that it was directed by a man who refuses to let emotion stand on its own. Steven Spielberg was absolutely and quite literally one of the worst directors that could have taken on a project aimed at revealing the dark, vulnerable side of one of history's favorite presidents.
Spielberg doesn't do dark (full disclosure: he actually does do "dark," but he thinks I'm referring to how well-light the screen is. Moving on.). He does vulnerable, but not the right kind. And when he tries, he tries too hard.
There's a common motto to journalists: "Show, don't tell." Spielberg does both (and that's not a good thing).
The director is adept at bringing the viewer to the precipice of emotion. In a perfect world, the tiniest gust of wind aids us in our slow lean over the edge and fall to what awaits below. But this isn't a perfect world, so Steven Spielberg instead waits until we've reached that spot, then lands a well-placed concussive elbow to the back of our head.
"OK, that's enough metaphor. What does he actually do to ruin the moment?"
Typically, it's the swell of uplifting classical music. The careful lens flare across the middle of the screen. In Lincoln, Spielberg adds a new ingredient: The monologue.
It's not that any of the three above are inherently bad. A good lens flare can add dimension to a shot and call attention to the beauty unfolding on the screen. A strong classical score can become a defining piece of a film -- ask John Williams. And I'm pretty sure that some famous writers have used monologue, but I don't really read, so...
Spielberg doesn't use the techniques above. He overuses them.
Watch the first 45 minutes of Lincoln. No really, go do it. Count the number of "inspiring" speeches DDL-as-Abe gives. Is it more than one? Then it's too many.
I can't emphasize the following enough -- Daniel Day-Lewis was magnificent in this movie. At some point, he ceases to be DDL and becomes Abraham Lincoln, the Adam Voge definition of a great performance in acting (we'll come back to this in later posts).

"I get an award for this, right?"

But Spielberg and his writers ruin any chance Lewis had of leading one of the great films of all time. The direction is ham-handed. The writing is scattered and all-inclusive. The cast outside of Lewis, frankly, is disappointing. They even included some damn comedic relief in a movie about bribery and war.
I'll give him this: Steven Spielberg brought his Spielbergian lens to the picture. That's probably what most people wanted. Hell, who wouldn't want to watch a movie about Lincoln and end up liking Lincoln and being sad when he dies?
But in doing so, the film misses its point. It was written to show what a conflicted man Lincoln was when he essentially cheated his way to freeing the slaves.
What should have come through is the toll that his actions played, and how hard it was to be the man everyone thought he was while actually being exactly the opposite, something we're all afraid we do. But instead we got another Schindler's List, an emotional and true tale told through the eyes of melodrama.
If I ran a studio (and didn't just produce Lincoln), I would pay a kingly sum to see a director capable of capturing conflict and emotion remake Lincoln. 
Who would that be? Fincher? Aronofsky? Russell? I'm not sure. But there are at least 20 directors out there who could do it better.
Lincoln could have been a great film. It really could have. But it's not.
It's your fault, Steven Spielberg. You ruined this for all of us.