Hyde Park On Hudson tackles dual suppressed public relations problems of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: his polio and his marital indiscretions. Not shy on infusing such a rich menu with still more challenging ingredients, Roger Mitchell’s film also takes on the 1939 visit of King George VI to Roosevelt’s country home, Springboard, in upstate New York. You’ll remember George VI from The King’s Speech. His visit is the first ever to America by a reigning British monarch and, if the film is to be believed, it comes at a time when Roosevelt’s affair with his sixth cousin, Daisy, is at a particularly critical juncture.
Oh, forgot to mention. Roosevelt is played by one Bill Murray. While the film’s varied elements are blended mostly capably, it is Murray’s absorbing performance that overshadows any of the film’s tonal shortcomings in its constant shifts from the profane to the political and back again. It’s hard to say which of FDR’s womanizing or his paralysis from polio was the more shielded from the public. With the press out of view, FDR is carried by an aide from his garden into his house. We witness his driving his specially equipped car, often the scene for his dalliance with Daisy (a superb Laura Linney), entirely with his hands. And while his pre-Monica Lewinsky constituency is spared the gritty details of his amorous transgressions, we get the strong feeling his wife Eleanor (Olivia Williams, The Ghostwriter) knows all about his ways and she looks the other way.
Murray gets it right with unalloyed wit and a resonant above-it-all air. You would be wrong to consider this a straight dramatic role since it is teeming with a humor and lightness that makes the larger mission of deciding whether to join King George in the war effort against Germany look like a walk in the park. In the film’s big scene Murray breaks out the scotch and cigars, brings George into his study, and makes him feel comfortable by subtly yet comically comparing George’s infamous stuttering to FDR’s own polio.
By this time FDR has dissed Daisy but it doesn’t stop him from calling on her to take a vital role in the climactic hot-dog picnic that is meant to seal Yankee-Brit solidarity. You get the feeling FDR always gets exactly what he wants. Unlike Daisy. Although she’s certainly a timid creature, her complacency once her relationship with FDR changes seems less a character flaw or product of the time, though, than to arise from a genuine affection for FDR.
Somewhat of a Mama’s boy, FDR respectfully puts his meddling mom, Sara, on a pedestal none of the other women in his life approach. While Wilde does an excellent job of portraying a self-assured Eleanor, she is mostly in the background, or as Murray tells Daisy, hanging out with her “she-women” friends. The marvelous British actress Olivia Colman plays Queen Elizabeth as a hoity-toity nag who pushes George around every chance.
Wearing its estimable lightness well, Hyde Park on Hudson ably unveils a seemingly quaint time of celebrity which seems downright nostalgic compared to today’s anything goes climate. Yet the film’s biggest revelation may not be that of FDR’s cheating ways or his hidden disability, but its portrayal of his ability to shmooz a king. He does so with a charm and tact that is sadly missing in the public arena today.
