Bill Murray would seem an unlikely Franklin Roosevelt. But the
promos for Hyde Park on Hudson show him surprisingly
persuasive, amid the charm and beauty of FDR’s upstate New York
estate. There he famously entertained the King and Queen of England
in 1939 as part of his stagecraft for persuading Americans
eventually into another wartime alliance with Britain against
Germany. It was a sort of hot dog summit, with the somewhat
surprised royals enjoying mustard on casual American fare in a
picnic.
But I’ll be skipping this movie, thanks to reviews from the
New York Post and the Washington Post, which
outline, respectively
favorably and
unfavorably, how the film is more a sex farce than biopic.
Supposedly the film is based on the diary and letters kept by
FDR’s cousin and friend Margaret Suckley, which were found in 1991
after she died at age 99. But the filmmakers evidently were
dissatisfied that none of the documents show Suckley as more than
an attentive companion to both FDR and Eleanor. So they turned her
into his mistress who performs a sexual act on the President while
he drives about the countryside, waving off the Secret Service.
Were Suckley still alive she’d probably be horrified. Never
married, she was a rather proper, Victorian spinster, in the
parlance of the day. Historian Geoffrey Ward, who published her
papers, believes she was chaste all her life, which she spent in
her family’s mansion near FDR’s. She was one of several doting
female cousins invited into his circle to attentively listen to his
stories, laugh at his jokes, and exchange Hyde Park gossip. Suckley
and another cousin were with FDR when he died at Warm Springs,
Georgia, in the presence of a woman, Lucy Rutherford, who really
had been his mistress decades before. Much of her remaining 46
years Suckley devoted to perpetuating his memory by working at his
nearby presidential library.
So Suckley was hardly Monica Lewinsky. But many film reviewers
have unquestioningly swallowed the tall tale. The New York
Post review, headlined “Commander in Cheat!” gushes: “Half as
long and twice as much fun as the self-important ‘Lincoln,’ Roger
Michell’s charming sex-and-politics comedy ‘Hyde Park on Hudson’ is
basically a frothy tabloid take on presidential history.” The
reviewer calls Suckley the “latest in a harem of mistresses” shown,
including presidential secretary Missy LeHand and publisher Dorothy
Schiff. Actually, Schiff later recounted that she probably would
have bedded the President. But he never asked her, instead housing
her with Eleanor at a separate cottage and merely driving her
good-naturedly about the estate. Schiff’s recall is noteworthy,
because it reveals a crippled man who enjoys the company of women
but who was not a Lothario. This historical nuance did not interest
the filmmaker. Evidently without much subtlety, the royal hot dog
picnic, which Suckley attends, is reputedly rife with phallic
symbolism. No doubt hilarious.
Fortunately, the real life characters in Hyde Park on
Hudson were far more interesting and more focused in 1939 on
weightier issues than hot dog sight gags. The Washington
Post review more accurately pans this “grubby little movie
about a shallow little man,” noting, “Never has crude behavior been
more attractively lit.” FDR is “less concerned with Hitler than
with juggling women he treats like hookers,” making Bill Clinton’s
“treatment of Monica Lewinsky look almost gallant” by comparison.
The Washington Post reviewer interviewed the historian
editor of Suckley’s papers.
“His relationship with her was an extremely old-fashioned, very
decorous sort of 19th century — they wrote each other letters and
may have kissed once, in a car on a hilltop,” Ward said. “It was
the delight of her life to be the friend of Franklin Roosevelt.”
Ward admitted FDR was “manipulative with everybody he knew; he was
a politician. But did he have what you so nicely called a
‘transactional relationship’ with her? No. I feel so guilty,” he
told the Post, for facilitating the film by publishing her
papers.
So the movie evidently is trash, adorned by good scenery, period
costumes, and a convincing performance from Murray, who touchingly
reenacts FDR’s nonchalant attitude towards his paralysis. A movie
that could have aspired to a more modest grandeur than Spielberg’s
Lincoln instead reduces a soaring historical personality
to the nasty level of a Hollywood casting couch.
If Hollywood wants to portray historically accurate presidential
scandal, there is more recent material available. But presumably
the Clintons would litigate against any authentic film chronicle of
his squalid behavior, if Hollywood were even willing. JFK’s own
episodes are also largely avoided or handled gingerly, despite a
new memoir by one of his conquests, who was a barely legal teenager
when seduced in the White House. A recent film about one of JFK’s
mistresses who was murdered instead absurdly targets the CIA and
anti-communist Cuban exiles as the killers.
But a prim, dignified matron of the Hudson Valley who befriended
FDR gets smeared as the sexual dish rag of her presidential cousin.
Hyde Park on the Hudson sounds thoroughly worth
avoiding.
