Roger Michell’s strange film about Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his mistress is fictionalised history wrapped in a very attractive variant of cotton wool. It had a so-so response in America.
It is really two tales awkwardly meshed together. The first has FDR (Bill Murray), one of America’s greatest politicians and statesmen but a man who liked a bit on the side, courting distant cousin Daisy (Laura Linney) at his Hyde Park house, under the noses of his domineering mother (Elizabeth Wilson) and possibly gay wife, Eleanor (Olivia Williams).
The other has the wheelchair-using President welcoming George VI and Queen Elizabeth (Samuel West and Olivia Colman) to Hyde Park, where Bertie and his bride are in the business of persuading the US to come into what was considered, in June 1939, to be an inevitable war with Nazi Germany.
We never learn very much about Daisy, even though Richard Nelson bases his screenplay partly on her diaries, except that she was shy and hesitant but not backward enough to refuse FDR a hand job while they were out in the country in his car. This is a scene that makes Downton Abbey look like a vicarage tea party, though it is fairly tactfully handled, if that is the right word to use.
We do learn quite a lot about the President and his royal guests because this is the script at its best and the acting is marvellously detailed. This is a film you can’t quite believe in but watch with interest all the same. Murray, who is a much better actor than his dottier image might suggest, is very fine, as are West and Linney. But there isn’t a poor performance throughout.
Despite its pleasures, Michell’s film doesn’t amount to very much, except for the fact that it tells us how craven the press was in those days where political peccadillos were concerned.
It’s a bit antimacassar and too reliant on superior production design and a syrupy score. But if you just watch the acting, it’s enough.
Read More
MORE ABOUT