Theodore Roosevelt would have kicked Leonardo DiCaprio's ass

So first, my apologies for getting Tuesday off to a grumpy start. I wanted a rush of warm happiness as much as you did, but then I read that Leonardo DiCaprio is inked to play the title character in Martin Scorsese's adaptation of the Edmund Morris biography The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. And then I spat out my coffee and shivered so violently my chair broke.

Look, here is the thing about Leonardo DiCaprio: He is not a good actor. He has skidded through a few dozen films on the basis of playing a retarded kid 13 years ago and maybe overachieved once or twice with The Basketball Diaries and Gangs of New York. That his reputation so outshines virtually any work he has ever done (although sleeping with a supermodel cancels out screaming James Cameron dialogue from the bow of the Titanic) is not the worst of it, however; that someone of Scorsese's caliber will have pinned four films in six years on DiCaprio's furrowed brow and wincing nasal twinge is more distressing by far.

The absolute worst of it, however, has to be picturing DiCaprio as Theodore Roosevelt. This is not Howard Hughes, of whom few (if any) Americans owned any physical or emotional conception when DiCaprio portrayed him in The Aviator (and still managed to fuck it up). Or, as screenwriter Nicholas Meyer explains:

"We start at 25, as he begins to transform himself through sheer force of will from this asthmatic, near-sighted 125-pounder to this Sherman tank of a man so tough that he once got shot on the way to make a speech and completed his talk, bleeding with a bullet in his chest," Meyer said.

OK, so maybe he did not have the iron will to sequester himself in the Oval Office with bad facial hair and line up milk bottles full of piss and mug his way to an Oscar nod. Nevertheless, we are talking about Theodore Roosevelt here—T.R., Rough Rider, New Yorker, President of the United States. Can anybody in Hollywood—anybody at all—please muster enough imagination to summon an alternative to Arnie Grape storming through the Spanish-American War? At least one life depends on it.