A bullseye version of Hawkeye

How Daniel Day-Lewis transformed Last of the Mohicans

The following post is part of a work in progress (previous posts below).

By the time director Michael Mann, and his co-screenwriter Christopher Crowe, decided to tackle Last of the Mhicans in the early 1990s, they had a treasure trove of material to work with, and fragments of these sources end up in their final product.  At one point in the book, for example, Magua pretends to obediently follow Major Haywood’s instructions to slow down for Cora and Alice’s sake, but mocks him in his own language. “The pale faces make themselves dogs to their women,” he says to himself, “and when they want to eat their warriors must lay aside the tomahawk to feed their laziness.” At a similar point in the movie, Magua says, “Magua understand white man is a dog to his women. When they want to eat he puts down his tomahawk to feed their laziness.”

But the 1936 version is Mann/Crowe’s most obvious template (Philip Dunne’s 1936 screenplay is acknowledged as a basis for their movie in the credits). A number of lines, most memorably Hawkeye’s sarcastic assertion to Heyward, “Someday you and I are going to have a serious disagreement,” are imported into the 1992 version wholesale. I also like, “If your aim is as bad as your judgment, Major, I don’t imagine there’s much danger of you hitting him,” another exchange between the two characters at a moment when Heyward is unwisely attempting to shoot Magua. In 1992, the line is shortened to the scout simply pointing Haywood’s rifle down and saying “in case your aim is any better than your judgment.”

The most important precedent for the filmmakers of 1992 movie, however, was a long tradition of artistic license. Once again there’s the tweaking of names – for no especially compelling reason, Hawkeye is renamed “Nathaniel Poe” this time around – and rearranging of characters. This time, Heyward (Steven Waddington) is in love with Cora (Madeleine Stowe), not Alice (Jhodi May), while Alice pairs off with Uncas (Eric Schweig).  It is also Alice, not Cora, who finds herself perched at the end of a cliff, and Alice who plunges off it (an act we associate with what we now call post-traumatic stress syndrome). One reason Alice is so traumatized is that her father, Col. Monro (Maurice Roeves) dies at the hand of Magua in a notably graphic scene, instead of surviving as he does in the book or dying in battle as he does in 1936. Magua, as usual, kills Uncas, but this time it’s Chingachgook (the famed Native American activist Russell Means, in a real star turn) who dispatches him instead of Hawkeye. In keeping with a well-known historical phenomenon, the Hawkeye character this time around (who I will henceforth call Nathaniel) is actually Chingachcook’s adoptive son; Nathaniel’s parents were killed in his infancy and he was raised as a Mohican. At one point he mentions attending Reverend Wheelock School, a reference to the real-life academy founded by Eleazar Wheelock, which ultimately became Dartmouth College.

Perhaps the most crucial change in this version of Mohicans – and one of a number of things that really sets it apart from its predecessors – is the skillful way it sharpens the latent geopolitical dimension in what his typically treated as a frontier tale with a little romance in it.  The character of Montcalm (Patrice Chereau, in another outstanding performance) is both appealing and ambiguous, and the elaborate rituals involving the surrender of Fort William Henry, depicted with great pomp, underlines the way in which British and French imperial officers have far more in common with each other, even as adversaries, than their respective colonial and Indian allies. Even better in this regard is the scene where Nathaniel negotiates for the release of Cora and Alice with the Tamenend figure, here an Ottawa named Ongewasgone (Dennis Banks, a founder, along with Means, of the American Indian Movement [AIM]). The only way Mohican can communicate with Ottawa is literally through the lingua franca of the eighteenth century world. So Nathaniel speaks in English to the bilingual Heyward, who translates Nathaniel’s words into the French for the Ottawa. Magua (a fabulous Wes Studi), who also knows French, gets predictably angry when he finally understands what’s being said. Ongewasgone has a final monologue in his own tongue (all this dialogue is subtitled). The scene is a pointed and useful reminder that multiculturalism was not invented in 1990.

But perhaps the most important renovation in Mohicans ’92 is the way in which Mann & Co. effectively turn it into a movie about the coming of the American Revolution. Again, the DNA for this was always there, most obviously in 1936. But the filmmakers play up the tension between local colonial militias, who are first and foremost trying to protect their homes, and the professional British military, which has its own strategic objectives. Their divergent interests become an issue when the militiamen seek to leave the fort to defend their hearths and are barred from doing so by Monro, even when Nathaniel informs him that Indian war parties are indeed ravaging local residents. “Does the rule of English law no longer govern?” asks Jack Winthrop (Edward Blatchford, playing a character unique to this movie), noting that he had been promised he would be allowed to leave in such a contingency. “Their law no longer has rightful authority over us, he says later, bitterly.” In this argument, Heyward, who has also witnessed the destruction in the countryside, nevertheless sides affirms Monro, the man he hopes will someday be his father-in-law. But his decision to so completes Cora’s tilt away from Heyward and toward Nathaniel – part of her larger Americanization (and one way in which the movie as a whole does more with its female characters than any previous incarnation of the story).

Of course, the pivotal figure in this regard – the linchpin of the movie, and that of the point I’m ring to make in this chapter – is the character of Nathaniel, more specifically the Nathaniel of Daniel Day-Lewis. This is much more than a matter of which lines of the script he utters. To put it simply, the Day-Lewis incarnation of Cooper’s creation is a magnificent creation in its own right. Though he lacks the muscularity of the typical movie-star hero, he is an impressive physical specimen: lanky but taut, strong but agile. As was becoming typical at this point in his career, Day-Lewis disappeared into the role. He worked out five times a week for six months in England before shooting commenced in Appalachian North Carolina. He also spent a month in the woods living there. Moreover, he learned to track and skin animals, build canoes, fight with tomahawks, and fire as well as re-load a flintlock rifle – which he carried with him everywhere, even to Christmas dinner.[2]

            But Nathaniel’s presence is much more than physical. Actually, the Hawkeye of all too many Mohicans – nowhere more so than Cooper’s – is something of a buffoon, a hayseed who’s not as dumb as he looks. Randolph Scott’s Hawkeye is one of the better ones, because the geniality he gives the character doesn’t undercut his sense of competence. But Day-Lewis blows all his predecessors away with his sheer intensity. More than that: it is an intensity of self-assurance. “I liked the idea of a man who had not been touched by 20^th-century neurosis,” he explained later. “A life that isn’t drawn inwards.”[3]

As such, Day-Lewis’s Nathaniel is the quintessential frontiersman. “You call yourself a patriot and loyal subject of the crown?” a sneering British officer asks at one point, wondering why Nathaniel shows no inclination to enlist in the militia. “I do not call myself subject to much at all,” he replies dryly. When Nathaniel joins the war effort, which he   does provisionally, it’s for his own reasons, not the empire’s. Though he’s involved in a dangerous scheme to help the militiamen escape from the fort and return to their families, he reveals that he won’t be with them. “I got a reason to stay,” he explains. “That reason wear a striped skirt and work in the surgery?” Winthrop asks. “It does,” Nathaniel replies. “No offense, but it’s a good deal better-looking than you, Jack Winthrop.”

What follows is the great love scene of the movie between Nathaniel and Cora, conducted against one of the major musical themes of the soundtrack, which fuses a Scottish reel and a Native American drumbeat. Day-Lewis’s chemistry with Stowe was part of a demographic appeal that cut across gender lines and ensured the film’s commercial office success. But it’s also crucial to Nathaniel’s identity – and Nathaniel’s central place in Day-Lewis’s gallery of American character portraits.  Nathaniel’s relationship with Cora faces all kinds of logistical complications – “Stay alive!” he shouts with furious rage on the eve of her capture by Magua, “I will find you!” – but the strength of that love, its uncomplicated purity, is never in doubt. Never again would Day-Lewis play a person so straightforwardly in love, so unconflicted internally, whatever the chaos around him.

This romantic clarity is of a piece with the larger sense of integration that marks Nathaniel’s character as a whole. He is a perfect Turnerian specimen, as at ease in a pick-up game of lacrosse as he is dining at the cabin of his friends, teasing Uncas about his prospects of finding a Delaware bride in Kentucky. At that point at the beginning of the film, he, Uncas and Chingachgook have just returned from fur hunting; in effect, the stretch of land between the Hudson and Ohio Rivers are Nathaniel’s stomping grounds. The three are headed back to Kentucky when they stop Magua from implementing his plans to seize the Munro sisters.

The fact that Nathaniel is not the entirely restless loner of Cooper’s saga, that there’s a place in his life for a woman who by the end of the film will literally stand by his side wherever he may go, is very much a part of the film’s larger design. The movie eschews the traditional funeral scenes of most Mohicans by having Chingachgook spread the ashes of Uncas over the western mountains amid a setting sun. He observes, as most versions of the story do, that he’s now the last of the Mohicans. But as sorry as we feel for Chingachgook, this version of the movie – as I will discuss, there are actually two 1992 versions, with subtly, but significantly, different endings – has a hopeful feel. That’s because we feel so strongly that the tragedy of Uncas notwithstanding, Nathaniel really is Chingachgook’s son (we moderns consider race and even parenthood a social construction, after all), and that in his presumed merger with Cora – a name takes on a new significance – the seed of a new national identity will be planted. As a hybrid, it will be resilient. And have plenty of room to grow. In this, the first film Day-Lewis made about American history, he embodies the frontier in its brightest phase and greatest height.

It will be all downhill from here.

Next: DDL and Gangs of New York

.

'Mohican' genealogy

On the varied versions of an American classic


In the almost two centuries since its publication in 1826, James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans has become a kind of pop culture jazz chart: a loose set of characters and plot points in a pop standard that have been rearranged and embellished countless times. Like a lot of jazz classics, Cooper’s source material lay in the public domain: collective memory of the French and Indian War, which ended a quarter-century before he was born.  Cooper subtitled his novel “a narrative of 1757,” since the events of the book take place at that moment when the Franco-Indian alliance against Britain and her colonists would crest with the capture of Fort William Henry, a key checkpoint in the chain of forts that secured British control of the Hudson River. Cooper, who was raised in upstate New York – his father was a large, and controversial, landowner in the baseball Mecca we know as Cooperstown[1] -- captured a time when the region was a frontier, and in so doing wrote what could plausibly be considered the first western.

Actually, Mohicans was part of a larger frontier saga, sometimes referred to as “the Leatherstocking Tales,” five novels that can plausibly be considered the Harry Potter books (or, perhaps more accurately, the Star Wars) of the nineteenth century. The Leatherstocking in question was a protagonist who went by a series of other names, including “Natty Bumppo,” “Hawkeye,”  “the Pathfinder,” and “La Longue Carabine” and and “the trapper.” (Poor Annakin Skywaker only had Darth Vader.) Over the course of this multi-part story, Cooper’s ever-restless protagonist, in good Turnerian fashion, keeps pushing to find open horizons, beginning in the northeast and ending, with as an old man in The Prairie, on the Great Plains at the time of the Lewis and Clark expedition (ca. 1806). Cooper wrote and published the five novels out of order; in narrative sequence, they are: The Deerslayer (1841, i.e. the first book was published last), Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Pathfinder (1840), The Pioneers (1823) and The Prairie (1827). As devotees of the saga know, the Star Wars saga was also produced out of sequence, and like producer-director George Lucas, Cooper was a hugely successful pop culture figure known for other work as well, though nothing as much as his multi-part masterwork. Unlike Lucas or Harry Potter J.K. Rowling, however, Cooper became ever more elitist in his political outlook, and in his work one sees what sometimes appears to be an inverse relationship between the expansiveness one’s racial politics (in this case, a relatively nuanced and appreciative view of Native Americans) and the narrowness, often unconscious, of class outlook (Cooper’s patriotism was increasingly coupled with growing disgust over the populist tenor of Jacksonian democracy).

From a contemporary standpoint, Cooper’s work is almost unreadably bad. Actually, “contemporary” is a fairly flexible term; Mark Twain’s hilarious 1895 essay “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” makes pretty short work of him.  Offering a mock-academic list of rules for successful fiction, Twain notes that Cooper’s chosen genre of romance “require[s] that the episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it. But as The Deerslayer tale is not a tale, and accomplishes nothing and arrives nowhere, the episodes have no rightful place in the work, since there was nothing for them to develop.”[2] And it pretty much does downhill from there. Only a sense of professional obligation led me to try, for a second time, to get through Mohicans to research this chapter. (I found The Prairie easier going in graduate school, but that may be because I was in better literary shape.)  “Is life grievous to you?” Cooper’s protagonist asks when another character foolishly tries to chase an Indian. “Yonder red devil would draw you within swing of the tomahawks of his comrades before you were heated in the chase.” Kinda makes you want to plunge a tomahawk into Hawkeye yourself, particularly when he sneers at another character for asking him for a biblical reference by saying “Book! . . . Do you take me for a whimpering boy at the apronstring of one of your old gals?”[3]  So much for flattering your audience.

Again, what has lasted in Mohicans – what indeed has proven to be amazingly supple – is a set of characters and a loose plot. (That and the title; when Twentieth Century Fox did a marketing survey as part of their plan to launch the 1992 film version of Mohicans, they found most moviegoers knew of the book, even though they hadn’t read it.)[4] The names sometimes get changed, and minor characters get added or subtracted, but at heart, the story involves the intersection of two sets of people with a villain who brings them together. At the center of the first is (the real-life) Lieutenant Colonel George Monro, who commands Fort William Henry, which sits on Lake George. Monro has two (apparently fictive) daughters, Cora and Alice, who are being brought to part of a group of reinforcements from nearby Fort Edward under the leadership of Major Duncan Heywood, who is in love with (the younger) Alice. This party is being directed through dangerous terrain by a Huron Indian guide named Magua. The Huron, like the Ottawa, are British enemies, but Magua is believed to be an outcast, and thus a reliable ally. In fact, he is not only working for the French army under the command of the Marquis Louis-Joseph de Montcalm, but is also hell-bent on revenge against Monro for giving him “firewater” and thus precipitating his alcoholic disgrace. As the villain of the story, Magua intends to lead the party into an ambush with his allies in the woods, and then dispose of the girls as he sees fit. But before he can do so, three other characters arrive on the scene as a skirmish breaks out. They are our protagonist, here called “the scout” or “La Longue Carabine,” as well as his companions, Uncas, and Uncas’s father, Chingachcook, the surviving remnants of the Mohican tribe (Cooper’s ethnography is murky here; he seems to conflate them with the Mohegans, who we all know are alive, well, and running casinos in Connecticut). They prevent Magua from realizing his dastardly scheme, but they fail to prevent his escape. A series of chases and captures follow, of which two are important. The first involves Cora and Alice’s reconciliation with their father at Fort William Henry. This proves brief, however, because the fort is on the verge of surrender, and because Montcalm cannot control his Indian allies, who pounce on the evacuated British contingent and cut it to pieces – events that are part of the historical record. The other involves a negotiation between Magua and his adversaries at the encampment of the Delaware sachem Tamanend (as in Tammany Hall, which long featured a sculpture of him). In Solomon-like fashion, Tamanend splits the difference between the antagonists giving Cora to Magua and Alice to the scout and his allies.  The climax of the story takes place high ledge from which Cora threatens to jump. Cora and Uncas die at the hand of Magua, and Magua in turn is dispatched by the scout. At the joint funerals of Uncas and Cora, whose low-key, but potentially problematic interracial attraction has been fortunately prevented by their deaths, Chicachgook sadly muses that he is the last of the Mohicans.

In the last hundred years, the principal medium through which this story has been re-told has been film – hardly surprising, given the proto-cinematic quality of the story. The first movie version of the novel, short and silent, came out in 1911. A 1920 version, also silent and selected for the National Film Registry, is an impressively executed piece of work with lots of exterior shoots. It scrambles the plot a bit by having a spurned suitor for Cora inside Fort Willliam Henry who turns out to be a turncoat for the French, but generally follows the outline of the novel. (The future horror star Boris Karloff has a cameo in the movie as a maurading Indian; another future horror star, Bela Lugosi, starred as Chicachgook in German version of Mohicans the same year.) A 1932 twelve-part serial version of the story – cheap, unintentionally comical, but surely thrilling to people like my father, who would have gone to see them as a kid part of a full slate of Saturday matinee movie-going -- ends with Chinachgook dead and Uncas as the last Mohican.  Probably the best-known version of the movie prior to 1992 would be the 1936 version starring Randolph Scott, who went on to be a fixture of westerns through the fifties. This Mohicans plays with some of the switched identity plot twists in the original novel, but departs from it – seriously, given the loner status so central to Cooper’s protagonist – both by having Hawkeye join the British army and fall in love with Alice. (Duty calls, but she’ll wait for him.)

Mohicans was also made into a series of television productions. A syndicated 1957-58 U.S.-Canadian production was made in Hollywood and starred Lon Chaney, Jr. as Chicachgook (amusingly faithful to its age of domesticity, it opens with Hawkeye coming home to his mother). An eight-part 1971 BBC series was long on acting talent but somewhat short in its production budget. Last of the Mohicans was also the name of a 1982 EP record by the British New Wave band Bow Wow Wow (it contained their biggest hit, “I Want Candy”; the weirdly incongruous cover depicted Mohicans-like characters inserted into a photograph modeled on the 1862 Edward Manet painting “The Luncheon on the Grass”).

So by the time director Michael Mann, and his co-screenwriter Christopher Crowe, decided to tackle Mohicans in the early 1990s, they had a treasure trove of material to work with, and ample precedent for artistic license. They took it – in a big way.  

Next: the 1992 version of Last of the Mohicans and Daniel Day-Lewis's take on the character of Hawkeye.

---

Shooting Star

The long road to Hollywood -- by way of Ireland -- for a child of the British artistic aristocracy


The following post on Daniel Day-Lews is part of a work-in-progress.

As a general proposition, there's nothing particularly surprising about a foreigner doing a notably good job at explaining the United States to Americans. A long tradition stretches from the proto-sociological musings of Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville (whose 1835/1840 study Democracy in America continues to be widely read) to the Taiwanese-born filmmaker Ang Lee (whose movies like The Ice Storm, Brokeback Mountain, and the overlooked Ride with the Devil are pitch-perfect in their evocation of their times). Like countless travelers to America, Daniel Day-Lewis left his homeland. But his adopted country is not the United States, but Ireland, a nation of emigrants more than immigrants.

Day-Lewis was born in London on April 29, 1957, of distinguished lineage. His father, Cecil Day-Lewis, was a leftist poet who went on to become Poet-Laureate of Great Britain. (Born in Ireland in 1904, he declared British citizenship after the creation of a separate Irish republic in 1948.) Daniel's mother, Jill Balcon, was a film and radio actor, and the daughter of Michael Balcon, a British-born Baltic Jew who entered the nascent film industry at the turn of the twentieth century and rose to become head of Ealing Studios, where he collaborated with figures such as Alfred Hitchcock. The marriage between Cecil Day-Lewis and Jill Balcon was the product of a May-November romance, and the birth of their daughter Tamasin and son Daniel was in effect the groom's second family (he had two sons from a previous marriage). Biographical accounts suggest both affection and distance between father and son, with his mother a presence until the end of her life in 2009.

Daniel Day-Lewis spent the first years of his life in the fairly posh Greenwich section of London in a childhood that is described in multiple accounts as "middle class." But this is a bit hard to believe. While it is certainly true that actors and poets do not typically have huge incomes, the mere fact that he was raised with live-in nannies suggests some degree of affluence. So does the string of literary celebrities (Vanessa Redgrave, Kingsley and Martin Amis, et. al.) that appear at his home in accounts of his youth. And the fact that he attended elite boarding schools. The first of these, Sevenoaks, was traditional and Day-Lewis hated it. He was later allowed to transfer to the more progressive Bedales, where his thespian aspirations first took root. (At age 12, he had a cameo appearance in the 1971 John Schlesinger thriller Sunday Blood Sunday.)

Day-Lewis appears to have had a relatively happy childhood, but but there are indications of restlessness and turmoil in his adolescence. He spent a fair amount of time scouring South London in what would prove to be a longstanding fascination with working-class life. Cecil Day-Lewis died in 1972, when Daniel was fifteen years old; the following year he was admitted to a psychiatric hospital for a drug overdose, which he claimed then and since was a misunderstanding. Though he had a long-term relationship that lasted for many years after high school, he was viewed by his peers as a loner. Uncertain of a career path after his graduation from Bedales and participation in Britain's National Youth Theatre program, he considered a career in carpentry. But he ultimately decided to follow in his mother's footsteps, gaining admission into the prestigious Old Vic Drama School in Bristol.

Over the course of the next decade, Day-Lewis embarked on a career trajectory of a professional stage actor. He appeared in a series of school productions, and upon his graduation endured the feast-or famine existence that characterizes the life of people struggling make a living as artists. He appeared in high-profile Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre productions, and also did television work for BBC movies and television shows. There were also occasional cameo appearances big-budget productions like the 1982 Academy-Award winning Best Picture Gandhi (he played a racist South African) and a supporting role in a 1984 remake of Mutiny on the Bounty (which flopped). Family connections were a factor in Day-Lewis's ability to land such parts, though his talent was never in doubt. Day-Lewis was also in good company: his peers included actors like Kenneth Branagh, Rupert Everett, and Gary Oldman, and Tim Roth, who would all go on to have distinguished stage and screen careers.

But Day-Lewis had a secret ambition that was not quite legitimate in this elite milieu: he wanted to become a bona fide move star. "Where I come from, it was a heresy to say you wanted to be in movies, leave alone American movies," later explained. "We were all encouraged to believe that the classics of the theater were the fiery hoops through which you'd have to pass if you were going to have self-esteem as a performer." [Hirschberg] Day-Lewis made a major step toward realizing his goal in the mid-1980s as a result of his wildly divergent performances in two films whose simultaneous release generated international attention. The first of these, My Beautiful Laundrette, started out as a BBC television drama written by Pakistani-British screenwriter Hanif Kureishi and helmed by veteran director Stephen Frears. A vivid document of Thatcherite Britain, the film is a cross-class and racial gay love story between an upwardly mobile Paki entrepreneur with strong family connections and a London punk reconsidering his thuggish ways. Day-Lewis, who had earned acclaim as a gay character in a 1982 West End production of Another Country, campaigned for the part by sending Frears threatening letters [Jenkins, 164], an early indication of what would prove to be a  uniquely intense approach to method acting. Greeted enthusiastically at the Edinburgh film festival in the fall of 1985, it was redirected for theatrical release, reaching the United States in early 1986. In a rave review of the movie as a whole, Vincent Canby of the New York Times singled out Day-Lewis for a "performance that has both extraordinary technical flash and emotional substance."

Shortly after finishing his work on My Beautiful Laundrette, Day-Lewis landed a role in another British film, this one an adaptation of the 1908 E.M. Forster novel A Room with a View. This project, a collaboration of the famed team of producer Ismail Merchant, director James Ivory and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, was a world away from My Beautiful Laundrette in its period detail, burnished production values, and literary pedigree. Interestingly, the part Day-Lewis sought and won was not the lead figure in a love triangle (that would go to Julian Sands), but rather that of the insufferable prig Cecil Vyse, whose snobbery costs him an engagement to the young woman played by Helena Bonham-Carter. As he later explained, the character of Vyse was that of "a man whose skin I could occupy in some of my worst nightmares." (Indeed, a morning television interview he gave at the time, while lacking the arrogance of Vyse, nevertheless conveys the patrician unease that has made Day-Lewis an elusive figure when it comes to dealing with the media.) Yet Day-Lewis's ability to humanize this almost cartoonish character in a crucial scene where he is rejected by his fiance was a principal reason why he won a New York Film Critics Circle award for Best Supporting Actor.

Again: the synergy here is important in transforming Day-Lewis from promising journeyman to overnight success. My Beautiful Laundrette and Room with a View were both released in the United States on March 7, 1986, and the experience of seeing them both in close proximity was, as I will testify personally, almost overpowering.  Canby called Day-Lewis's performance in View "spectacular," noting "a style and wit all the more remarkable when compared with his very different characterization in My Beautiful Laundrette." Chicago Sun-Times review Roger Ebert was even more emphatic. "Seeing these two performances side by side is an affirmation of the miracle of acting: That one man could play these two opposites is astonishing," he wrote.

While the two movies certainly raised Day-Lewis's profile internationally, they did not transform his career immediately. He followed up his work on them with a small role in an Anglo-French production, Nanou (1986), and appeared onstage in Futurists, a National Theatre Production of a play about the Russian Revolution. His next film project was a starring role as Tomas, a doctor, in a 1987 screen version of Milan Kundera's 1984 novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a love story set amid the Prague Spring of 1968 and directed by the Philip Kaufman (who had worked with Clint Eastwood before being fired from the set of The Outlaw Josey Wales). Clocking in at almost three hours, Lightness is a beautifully made film (Day-Lewis worked with the accomplished Lena Olin and Juliette Binoche, among other actors), but a bit plodding in its fidelity to the novel. It was not a commercial success. Nor was his next project, Stars and Bars (1988), in which Day-Lewis plays Henderson Dores, a hapless London art dealer who comes to America in the hope of procuring a valuable painting from an eccentric patriarch (Harry Dean Stanton). His love interest, played by Joan Cusack, makes this one of the most interesting casts of any Day-Lewis has made. But the creaky stereotypical plot -- borderline offensive in its portrayal of Southern whites -- helped ensure it virtually disappeared without a trace.

Clearly, Day-Lewis was a successful actor. But it was much less clear that he had truly attained movie-star status, notwithstanding his evident sex appeal in the erotically-charged Lightness. Ironically, the role that helped him reach it was that of that of an unlikely real-life character: the handicapped Irish writer and poet Christy Brown (1932-1981). Teaming up with the seasoned stage director but film neophyte Jim Sheridan, Day-Lewis gave a tour de force performance in My Left Foot (1989), which won him an Academy Award for Best Actor in 1990. It was in this role that Day-Lewis's growing penchant for staying in character for an entire production became a practice of widespread comment -- and, for the crew that had to treat this able-bodied man as if he were paralyzed -- some irritation.  But there seemed to be no arguing with the results. Day-Lewis would team up again with Sheridan for In the Name of the Father (1993), in which he played Gerry Conlon, an Irishman wrongly jailed with his father for terrorism, and The Boxer (1997), movies which capture the claustrophobic character of Ireland at the time of "The Troubles." The intensity of Day-Lewis's identification with the country is suggested by his decision to reaffirm his connection with the land of his father's birth by becoming an Irish citizen in 1987.

Following My Left Foot, Day-Lewis once again made an off-beat foray to Patagonia, where he played an itinerant dentist in Eversmile, New Jersey (1989), a British-Argentine production. He then made embarked on a Royal National Theater tour of Hamlet. This turned out to be a disaster, not so much in terms of reviews (which were mixed) but in the emotional strain the role seemed to impose. There was much speculation at the time that the performance led Day-Lewis to dredge up unresolved feelings about his own father. About three-quarters of the way through the production Day-Lewis suddenly froze on stage in October of 1989. He never returned to the show -- or the stage.

It was at this point that Day-Lewis crossed paths with Michael Mann, a Chicago-native director who rose to fame on the strength of his fashionable 1980s television series Miami Vice. Mann was leveraging his commercial Hollywood power for a surprising project: a big-budget blockbuster version of James Fenimore Cooper's 1825 novel Last of the Mohicans. Certain that Day-Lewis was perfect for the lead, Mann succeeded in recruiting him for it. In some sense, at least, it probably wasn't all that hard. Long a fan of American movies -- and a devotee of method-actor predecessors like Robert DeDiro -- Day-Lewis was fascinated by the United States. "I didn't know America," he said in 2007, explaining why he went to see Taxi Driver over and over again upon its release in 1976, "but that was a glimpse of what America might be, and I realized that, contrary to expectation, I wanted to tell American stories." And so he did.

We now need to break the chronology of this story. Day-Lewis made a string of movies about the United States between 1992 and 2007, ranging from the seventeenth century world of the Puritans in The Crucible (1997) to the aftermath of the 1960s in The Ballad of Jack & Rose (2005). Though they were not made in order, and though it's very unlikely there was much in the way of a conscious design, it is the contention of this chapter that they trace a thematically unified narrative arc. So we're going to follow them in the sequence of their settings, not their production. And begin, as well as end, in New England.

More to come.