"Hyde Park on Hudson' (2nd review)

In the early summer of 1939, the U.S. was in the tenth year of the Great Depression. Franklin D. Roosevelt, with a third-term election already on the horizon, made grumbling noises about how the government would have to begin investing in the economy again if private enterprise didn't soon create more jobs (sound familiar?).

Still, America was a paradise compared to a Europe sliding rapidly toward a second world war. FDR was thinking about that, too, and a secret commission would soon advise him that a Nazi-dominated Europe could isolate the U.S. commercially and politically. Public opinion, however, was staunchly isolationist, and Congress had substantially tied Roosevelt's hands with the Neutrality Acts of 1937.

Great Britain, too, was doing its own thinking on the subject of war. America's belated entry into World War I had proven critical to the defeat of Imperial Germany. Hitler was a greater challenge than the Kaiser had been, and fascist regimes were already in place throughout most of central, southern and eastern Europe. The Soviet Union, its previous overtures for an alliance rebuffed, was now deaf to appeals from the British and French. It did not take much imagination to foresee the worst.

Under these circumstances King George VI undertook a visit to North America in May 1939. He stopped in Canada, cementing a strategic collaboration that would prove vital in holding the British Commonwealth together for the war effort. But he had a much more important mission in the U.S.

DiMaggio fever

We Americans are, if not quite blasé about visiting British royals, certainly accustomed to them by now. So it may bring one up a bit to realize that only two British sovereigns have ever visited us— Elizabeth II, of course, and her father George. The U.K. did have friends here, but, in that pre-"Masterpiece Theater" age, an Anglo-American alliance was not so easily taken for granted.

We'd fought the British for our independence, and again in the War of 1812. The Brits had supported the South during the Civil War, and our World War I alliance hadn't been entirely smooth. Churchill— whom George VI wished to keep out of office— did a magnificent snow job on us, but, in early 1939, it was much more important to most Americans that Joe DiMaggio was hitting .400 and that Lou Gehrig was out of the Yankee lineup with a mysterious ailment. George VI knew nothing about baseball.

This is the setup for Roger Michell's period piece, Hyde Park on Hudson (the title refers to FDR's personal retreat). It's interesting that this film is the third in four years, beginning with Tom Hooper's The King's Speech, to feature the hitherto invisible George VI, a deeply insecure man of limited sophistication and intelligence who did manage to grow into the job of king but who remains one of the most inscrutable monarchs in British history.

'Cripple' contradictions

On the other hand, FDR, one of the two or three most consequential political figures in the history of what is still, for the moment, the only planetary superpower, has received only the most cursory screen attention, apart from the film version of Sunrise at Campobello, which doesn't deal with his presidency at all.

One of the reasons for this cinematic oversight, I suspect, is that Roosevelt was a cripple who couldn't stand or walk unaided. As Hyde Park's Roosevelt, Bill Murray, points out, this fact was never alluded to in the press or mentioned by anyone else.

The truth was perfectly visible to anyone who saw FDR in person, but one that at the same time did not publicly exist. On screen, however, it must exist, and the viewer must see it being dealt with. Disability, like much else in our lives, has now become public in a way that was inconceivable to past generations. But the sight of FDR being matter-of-factly picked up by an aide to be carried indoors like a child was shocking, to this viewer at least, as no shoot-'em-up screen mayhem could be.

Murray's challenge

It's not that one is embarrassed for him, for Murray's FDR betrays not the slightest embarrassment himself, but that one is brought face to face with the reality of what Roosevelt had to overcome, both within himself and with everyone else— politicians, pundits, kingmakers and the general voting public— in order to be entrusted with what was already the world's most powerful position.

The ambition that drove this man, and the will that sustained him, clearly ranked with those of the greatest political leaders who ever lived. One must see that in any portrayal, but one must also see the human being behind the monstre sacré. Quite a challenge for an actor.

There's much to admire in Bill Murray's seemingly relaxed but highly studied performance. He conveys a deal of FDR's charm and wit, as well as the sense of patrician entitlement that came with being a Roosevelt.

Hunger for love

The vulnerabilities are there, too— not only the obvious one that comes with having to be carried about physically but the emotional ones that come with political life, particularly in a democracy. It's a truism that psychiatrists are the ones most in need of their own services, but it's equally true that those who lead also hunger to be loved. We need only think of JFK, LBJ and Bill Clinton. FDR, Hyde Park suggests, required the consolations of women no less— a delicate matter, given his physical limitations.

This is indeed the framework of the film, which involves the seduction of a fifth cousin, Daisy (Laura Linney), who is summoned more or less like a serf to the manor, and learns the place that (among others) she is intended to fill. There is of course the official mistress, Missy, and wife Eleanor, to whom Roosevelt remains attached although she has moved on to emotional consolations of her own. The film implies that other figures lurk in the background, but for economy's sake we stay with these; after all, this isn't "Downton Abbey."

The problem with this approach is that Daisy— the real-life Margaret Suckley— is a naÓ¯ve and dowdy spinster, and it's entirely unclear how or why FDR picks her out of the heap. Being a member of the family ensures her discretion, but few other points speak in her favor. Her voice-over narration, moreover, carries much of the rest of the plot, although her character has only a dim idea of the stakes in the royal visit, and an even dimmer notion of the psychodynamics around her.

Queen Elizabeth as shrew

It seems, indeed, that FDR is the only adult in the room, although we do get a glimpse of Eleanor's shrewdness in Olivia Williams's portrayal. Samuel West's George VI is sympathetic but dimwitted, and his shrewishly insecure wife Elizabeth (Olivia Colman) conveys nothing of the fiber that enabled her to virtually reshape the monarchy during World War II and rendered her the most universally admired figure in British public life for half a century after her husband's death.

In the sit-down where FDR and George get down to brass tacks, George actually begins to read from a printed statement before breaking down in a stammer. Truth may be stranger than fiction, but it's dramatically inconceivable that the fate of nations should rest on the schoolboy recitation of a prepared text.

Hyde Park thus raises serious questions about the personal and political intersections of power, and about the formation of the so-called Special Relationship between Britain and the U.S. that helped finesse America's entry into World War II. But it never focuses steadily or searchingly enough on them to make a cohesive film.

Wasted actress

Murray does what he can with the brittle wit of Richard Nelson's Terrence Rattigan-like screenplay, but he too settles for playing it safe. As a comic, he was known for his screwball antics, but as an actor he seems to favor depressive shades of gray, as Daniel Day-Lewis did in his recent portrayal of Lincoln. Henry Fonda, who also played Lincoln, could have nailed both parts, but he wasn't available.

As Daisy, Laura Linney also tunes herself down in a wasted turn by one of our finest actresses. About that special relationship, too—revealed only by the real Daisy's posthumously discovered diaries— we learn too little.

Hyde Park has its virtues: a good ensemble cast, some lovely photography, and the feel of a more innocent age when presidents had privacy and a .400 batting average wasn't immediately sent to a drug lab. It pivots, too, on a critical moment in American history, when a president set in motion a chain of events that for better or worse has defined us as a nation ever since.

It's part of our mythology that Pearl Harbor robbed us of our innocence, but clearly the road to war was paved by a president who decided it had to be fought when the vast majority of his countrymen still thought it shouldn't be. The feel-good politics of Hyde Park— democracies standing shoulder to shoulder— conceals this profound irony, just as the idyllic Hudson Valley countryside obscures the reality of an economic depression that only a world war would finally end. ♦


To read another review by David Woods, click here.
To read a related comment by Steve Cohen, click here.