By Pamela Zoslov
After Steven Spielberg’s worshipful
LINCOLN, it should be refreshing to see a presidential biopic
that doesn’t overlook its subject’s flaws. HYDE PARK ON HUDSON
takes an unflinching view of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
showing his withered legs, his need to be carried bodily by strong
attendants, and the frustration beneath his familiar bonhomie over
his handicap. It also highlights his marital infidelity. Who’d have
thought a film about presidential philandering would focus on the
discreet affairs of the crippled FDR rather than the brazen,
compulsive womanizing of John F. Kennedy?
As refreshing as this honesty is, it’s
uncomfortable watching the 32nd president, impersonated here by Bill
Murray, jiggling in his shiny convertible as he receives a hand job
from his fifth cousin, Daisy (Laura Linney). That scene is bookended
by a later one in which Daisy, at the behest of her presidential
lover, smears mustard on a hot dog held by England's King George VI
(Samuel West), a presumably unintended hint of eroticism that
underscores her role as FDR's concubine.
Daisy is based on FDR cousin Margaret
Suckley, who reportedly had a long-term affair with the president
that was revealed by letters and diaries found after her death. Daisy
narrates the film, recounting how she came to be the president's
confidante and mistress, one of several women who gave Roosevelt
companionship and solace while his wife, Eleanor, kept separate
lodgings with her friend Lorena Hickok ("Hick").
Director Roger Michell (NOTTING
HILL, MORNING GLORY, VENUS), insisted on the
unlikely casting of Murray, who delivers a subtle but uninspiring
performance, lilting the patrician accent and wielding the famous
cigarette holder without stooping to caricature. Overcoming the
banality of Richard Nelson's script, however, is a task beyond Murray
or any of the movie's other capable actors. Capturing FDR's ebullient
personality requires wit and imagination, two things Nelson seems to
lack. Oliver Wendell Holmes once said Roosevelt had a “second-class
intellect but a first-class temperament” — his magnetic
personality was key to his political success. Nelson provides FDR
with folksy anecdotes and good-natured complaints about his
domineering mother and disapproving wife, but the dialogue lacks the
necessary sparkle.
Take FDR's seduction of Daisy. After
summoning her from her ramshackle Duchess County, NY home, where she
cares for an aged aunt, the president shows Daisy his stamp
collection. Not once but several times, he invites her to admire his
album of international stamps. “This is the tallest waterfall in
the world,” he raves about one specimen, sounding more like a
boring, senile granddad than the president famous for his charisma.
The story centers around the 1939 visit
of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth to Roosevelt’s Hyde Park, NY
estate in an effort to secure support for the war, would be fertile
ground for a clever comedy of manners, focusing on the culture clash
between the proper monarchs and the often too-casual Roosevelts. (The
real Eleanor, who had little interest in cuisine, was known to serve
meager meals, to the despair of the epicurean Franklin).
Alas, it is not to be. Nelson’s
fatuous script imagines the Queen (Olivia Colman) berating her royal
husband, Bertie, for stammering and for not acting more like his
brother, the ex-king Edward —two things the actual Elizabeth is
unlikely to have done (she resented Edward for abdicating and loathed
“that woman,” Wallis Simpson). The script also has the royal
couple flummoxed (Bertie) and indignant (Elizabeth) that the
Roosevelts plan to serve hot dogs at a picnic. I lost count of the
times Elizabeth haughtily pronounced the phrase “hot…dogs,” as
though the Roosevelts were serving horse droppings. A less
literal-minded writer would surely have invented better dialogue for
a late-night meeting between the King and the President than to have
Bertie lament, “This goddamn stutter!” and Roosevelt respond
cheerfully, “This goddamn polio!” That writer also would probably
not have FDR’s mistress-cousin, feeling spurned for a more senior
paramour, confronting Roosevelt: “Am I like a whore?”
The settings and costumes establish a
convincing sense of time and place, and there is a mildly amusing
turn by Elizabeth Wilson as Franklin’s stern mother and an
unusually attractive masculine-suffragist version of Eleanor (Olivia
Williams). The tumultuous events of the time are addressed
superficially, but history is not the movie’s focus. HYDE PARK
is one of those “I Rubbed Shoulders (or some body part) with Fame”
stories, like ME AND ORSON WELLES or MY WEEKEND WITH
MARILYN — only with a U.S. president instead of a Hollywood
celebrity. While the film aims to be whimsical, it’s actually
distasteful — not to mention trivial, given the time period it
depicts. (An epilogue states cornily that Britain and the U.S.
fought "shoulder to shoulder" in the war. See Oliver Stone
and Peter Kuznick's THE UNTOLD HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
for alternative enlightenment). They were serious times, and yet
here's a film more interested in presidential hand jobs than in the
gathering storm of World War II.
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