In addition to being arguably the greatest actor of his generation, Daniel Day-Lewis, who announced his retirement from acting in 2017, was the foremost practitioner of Method acting and gained a fearsome reputation for being willing to go to the most extreme lengths to convincingly portray a character.
For his Oscar-winning performance as Christy Brown, an Irish man who was limited by cerebral palsy to the use of his left foot, in the 1989 biographical comedy-drama film My Left Foot, Day-Lewis remained in a wheelchair throughout the filming, forcing crew members to carry him around and feed him. However, the actor arguably never immersed himself more deeply within a role as he did in the 1992 historical action-adventure film The Last of the Mohicans, in which he plays frontiersman Nathaniel “Hawkeye” Poe, the English-born adopted son of a Mohican tribesman.
Besides undergoing a strict training regime to increase his physique and stamina, Day-Lewis, like his character, fully embraced the survivalist wilderness lifestyle, in which he learned to build canoes, fight with tomahawks, hunt and skin animals, as well as being able to fire and load a 12-pound flintlock rifle while running in a full sprint.
With The Last of the Mohicans director Michael Mann, Day-Lewis found himself aligned with a director whose obsessive quest for authenticity and perfection matched his own. The Last of the Mohicans, which is now available to watch on Tubi, serves as an awe-inspiring testament to Day-Lewis and Mann’s passion, in addition to being a great historical epic.
The Last of the Mohicans Is a Breathtaking Romantic Adventure
The Last of the Mohicans is set in 1757 during the French and Indian War, in which the British and French battled for control of the American colonies. As the film opens, a troop of British soldiers are ambushed by Huron warriors while trying to escort two women, the daughters of a British Colonel, to a military fort. The Huron attack was organized by Magua, a vengeful Huron chief who posed as a British guide while secretly working for the French.
After Magua, played by Wes Studi, leads the British soldiers into the ambush, the lone surviving soldier, Major Heyward, and the two women, sister Alice and Cora, are rescued by Daniel Day-Lewis’ character, Hawkeye, who is joined by Hawkeye’s adoptive brother Uncas and father Chingachgook. After Hawkeye and his family agree to escort Cora and her sister to the fort, a romance develops between Hawkeye and Cora, played by Madeleine Stowe.
The Last of the Mohicans is the kind of glorious old-fashioned adventure and sweeping epic that rarely emerges from Hollywood today. However, while The Last of the Mohicans is enjoyable on a purely visual level, the film achieves its most powerful effect through Michael Mann’s expert blending of tension and violence, as well as Day-Lewis’ muscular, quietly forceful leading performance, through which the film explores themes of family, love, and sacrifice.
Daniel Day-Lewis Risked His Mental and Physical Health to Star in The Last of the Mohicans
While the Method approach that Daniel Day-Lewis brought to the role of Hawkeye in The Last of the Mohicans certainly had a positive effect on the finished film, this process took a toll on his health, as evidenced by the bouts of claustrophobia and hallucinations that Day-Lewis experienced during the filming, which took place in the rugged Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Day-Lewis’ performance in The Last of the Mohicans is fairly restrained, in contrast to his effusive performances in the period films Gangs of New York and There Will Be Blood.
One of the most interesting and surprising aspects of Day-Lewis’ performance in The Last of the Mohicans is the deference and generosity that he displays toward the film’s Native American cast members, especially Russell Means, whose Chingachgook character earns the film’s titular distinction after engaging in a climactic battle to the death with hated enemy Magua.
The great dedication that the actor brought to the role of Hawkeye is very evident in a climactic scene in which Hawkeye, while sprinting across rocky, mountainous terrain, fires his rifle clip into an enemy, drops his rifle, and then takes possession of an enemy weapon, all without breaking stride, just as Day-Lewis had been trained to do.
The Last of the Mohicans Is Michael Mann’s Most Overlooked Masterpiece
The legendary intense focus that Michael Mann brings to his work is a primary reason he has directed a comparably small number of films throughout his feature directorial career, which began with the 1981 thriller Thief. Mann’s painstaking attention to detail is evidenced by the approximately six-year gap between the release of Mann’s great 1986 thriller film Manhunter and The Last of the Mohicans.
Released in 1992, The Last of the Mohicans grossed approximately $143 million at the worldwide box office, the highest box-office total for any Mann film until the 2004 thriller Collateral. Moreover, The Last of the Mohicans won an Oscar for Best Sound, the first and only Oscar that any Mann-directed film has received.
However, despite the fact that The Last of the Mohicans was a commercial and critical success, the film isn’t held in the same high regard by audiences and critics as Mann’s crime-oriented films, especially his epic 1995 crime thriller Heat, which is now considered to be one of the greatest films of its era. Despite being relatively overlooked within Mann’s career, The Last of the Mohicans is an undeniable masterpiece, which is unmatched in Mann’s career in terms of establishing the filmmaker as a master visual storyteller whose expert blending of realism and style enables the images and sounds of The Last of the Mohicans to reverberate in the viewer’s mind long after the film is over. The Last of the Mohicans is streaming now on Tubi.
