Why, Daniel Day-Lewis, why?
What is the SI unit of greatness?
Let’s get back to this question after a mild detour of cinema. Within which, there’d be a stage and the whole world’s acting on it. Everybody from the screenwriters to the film-makers to the actors to the light-boys to the PRs are always pretending. There’s not an ounce of sincerity in what they do. It’s not their fault either. Cinema, by definition, perpetuates an ecosystem where nothing is supposed to be real. All the sounds one hears—from aaah to awww to awwwful — on the set are mere clones of an expected reaction. The production sets are fake and so are those expressions on the stars’ face. A tiny catch being it’s so unreal that it should come out as real. And that’s where the crux of this ridiculously expensive art form is located.
Cinema, for lack of kinder words, replicates the tenets of life without giving up its claim to prominence. Life doesn’t cash the luxury of retakes. Cinema thrives on second and third and fourth… chances. Life flirts with perfection for art’s sake. Cinema lures perfection to bed for glory’s sake. There’s a mirror between life and cinema. Just that life can’t manipulate cinema whereas cinema leeches on life. This relationship is, well, complex.
Such a predestined setting has carried on for over a century and no amount of technological advent can halt its progress. Stars rise and stars fall. Cinema survives regardless of the concurrent stalwarts. Why? What we see is what we want to get more and more. That’s the USP of stardom, not cinema. Cinema is its own facilitator.
Fortunately, Daniel Day-Lewis is not a star.
One of the rare gems of our times, he is among the few in the world who can call themselves actor without second thoughts. Unlike a lot of the earthly satellites who are dying to be taken seriously for their acting chops, but somehow fail miserably, Day-Lewis manages to stay aloof in his own zone. You don’t read about his life in the tabloid. He’s nowhere to be seen in the glitzy parties and social dos. He loves acting and at the same time, he wouldn’t act in a film just for the heck of it.
Let’s change that to won’t.
Damn.
Here’s the update: He reportedly quit the profession last month. This is not the first take of him saying goodbye though. The only worry being he might be serious this time around. It was at the turn of the century that he decided to learn shoe-making in Italy in lieu for his film career. According to Hollywood legend, Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio convinced him to hang up his boots — no pun intended — and help them make Gangs of New York (2002). Since then, he had appeared in only five films. Lincoln (2012) was the last one we saw him in and and Phantom Thread (2017) would be his swansong.
Overall, a splendid career, even if he takes a U-turn and reneges on his words. Hope he does that, if not in this decade then at least the next one. However, the most begging questions are: What makes a screen genius like him do what he does? Which sort of stories move him? Why does he have to give his 153% in every role when his peers are barely scaling 60%? (These stats aren’t real, just fickle expressions, like cinema itself.) Who does he look up to when he has to look up to someone? Where does he draw his bucket of inspiration from? When is the correct moment to ditch the camera? How are we going to cope with this loss?
OK. The nicest thing about being his fan is he taught us how to survive without him. One can only imagine the number of scripts that must have been greeting him. One doesn’t have to imagine very hard on how many of those were approved. The biggest irony being the fact that the greatest thespian of our times happens to be a part-time actor. And unless he decides to let us know someday, we’ll never know why he said it’s time to leave now. Until then, let’s stay hopeful. Similarly, we might never know the answer to the riddle in the first sentence but the SI unit of choosiness has to be Day-Lewis.
