That Roger Michell’s and Richard Nelson’s Hyde Park On
Hudson opened on December 7th could be said to add
a new dimension of meaning to Franklin Roosevelt’s dictum after
Pearl Harbor that it was “a date that would live in infamy.”
Certainly, he would not have been pleased by the film’s portrait of
himself — assuming it were possible (as, of course, it wasn’t) that
any such film could have been made in his lifetime. Yet in our
21st century world it will doubtless come across to many
as an effort to “humanize” the great man — who will, accordingly,
shed some of the characteristics of historical greatness and take
on some of those of the celebrity, that new thing in the
world which, since Roosevelt’s time, we have learned to desiderate
in our presidents and even in lesser politicians. FDR’s “star
power” or “charisma” can only be retrospectively enhanced by this
movie — though it is, as I say, more than doubtful that he himself
would have valued any such commodities.
The movie is, as Mark Tooley has pointed
out on The American Spectator’s website,
a “tall tale” which imagines the aristocratic FDR’s behaving more
like such low-life successors as Jack Kennedy and Bill Clinton than
there is any historical warrant for believing he actually did. Yet
I would disagree with Mr. Tooley’s characterization of the movie as
“trash.” Trash is, in any case, today’s cultural currency. There is
scarcely anyone now left alive who knew Roosevelt the man, so that
if he is not yet he soon will be as much a subject for literary
reinterpretation as the Plantagenet kings of England were by
Shakespeare’s time, a century after the last of them had died.
Shakespeare’s kings were probably as much at variance with their
historical counterparts as Mr. Michell’s FDR, but we may find an
unexpected delight in what his picture has to say about the meaning
and desirability of the celebrity culture which, as some of us
believe, has had such a lamentable effect on our politics since
Roosevelt’s time.
The first and most important thing it has to say about this
culture has to do with its ultimate derivation from traditional
views of royalty. The movie is set at Hyde Park, FDR’s mother’s
home (as it then was) in New York state where, in the summer of
1939, the President (Bill Murray) is visited by the British King,
George VI (Sam West), and Queen Elizabeth, later to be known as
Queen Mum (Olivia Colman), just as the Second World War was looking
to more or less everyone to be more or less inevitable. The
importance of the visit, the first by a British king to these
shores since the Revolution, as a good will exercise in winning
America’s help for his country in the coming war against Nazi
Germany is stressed throughout, as is the king’s doubtfulness about
his own ability to accomplish his mission — or much of anything
else. Both things seem to have been historically accurate, as is
the king’s stutter, which we learned all about two years ago from
the Oscar-winning King’s
Speech.
At the time of the visit, it had been less than three years
since the king had succeeded his brother, Edward VIII, subsequently
Duke of Windsor, who had been forced to abdicate in order to marry,
as he put it, the woman he loved, an American divorcée named Wallis
Simpson. The glamorous Prince of Wales, as he was for more than two
decades before briefly ascending the throne on the death of George
V, Edward VIII had been one of the pioneers of the celebrity
culture, and there can be little doubt that his attitude to the
traditional stuff of tragedy — a Racinean conflict in great men
between love and duty, which must always be resolved in favor of
duty — had been affected by the popular preference for comedy and
the triumph of love. Yet it also must have helped to assure that
his brother’s reign, like that of the present monarch, his
daughter, should have been characterized by the most proper sort of
middle-class decorum.
Certainly Hyde Park on Hudson plays off of this irony
by contrasting the comparatively prim royal couple with the sort of
sexual shenanigans in the Roosevelt ménage that might have been
expected from the old-fashioned sort of king, like Charles II or
Louis XIV. In the Roosevelt household, the President is “serv’d,
approach’d and address’d to with the most humble Submission, and
superlative Respect,” as Bernard Mandeville says George I was more
than two centuries earlier, and every courtier “was only born to
procure him either Ease or Pleasure.” Roosevelt also represents an
extreme of aristocratic endogamy by picking not only his wife,
Eleanor (Olivia Williams), but his latest paramour — a distant
cousin named Daisy Suckley (Laura Linney) — from within the family.
When Daisy makes a reference to the last king’s having given up the
throne for the woman he loved, Eleanor scoffs loudly: “Have you
ever met a man who would do that?” Certainly she has been left with
no illusions about the bourgeois ideal of conjugal love.
Most critics in America seem to have been more or less of Mark
Tooley’s mind, in spite of a few raves. Peter Debruge of Variety uses
the words “unseemly” and “tacky” in the first paragraph of his
review, which just goes to show that if there is no one else whose
dignity, we think, we are bound to respect, FDR’s still qualifies.
As I remarked in my review of Your
Sister’s Sister last summer, I didn’t think
the word “unseemly” was even a part of the critical vocabulary
anymore. Certainly it is not known to and would not have been
understood by the characters in that movie. Mr. Debruge sees it as
a black mark against this one that “Nelson’s script constantly
feels the need to reiterate the notion that presidents and kings
really aren’t that special.” Pardon me for noticing, but didn’t the
media figure that out for us a generation or more ago? But he also
sees the centrality of the scene in the President’s study, over the
whisky late at night:
Hoisting himself out of his wheelchair, Roosevelt crosses the
room to his desk, coaching the insecure young king on the fact that
their subjects look past their leaders’ flaws and see only the
strengths. “Can you imagine the disappointment when they find out
what we really are?” he asks pointedly.
It’s a key moment, however, because of the historical context.
Viewed from the perspective of a time when all — or nearly all —
has been found out, the scene prompts the reflection that
“disappointment” is not quite the right word to describe our
insatiably prurient interest in what we find. We might also wonder
if there isn’t something to be said for a culture in which the
“flaws” of our leaders, like the President’s paralysis from polio,
were deliberately overlooked as something unworthy of notice in
someone ranking, as some people did in those days, well above
celebrity level. Perhaps we should see the unseemliness of FDR’s
apocryphal sexual adventures as part of a deliberate attempt to
remind us of the existence of things that we once were and might
once again be above wanting to know about.
Such ironies also give an extra level of meaning to the
climactic scene in the movie when the King and Queen are served hot
dogs at a Rooseveltian picnic. At first inclined to see this as a
calculated slight, they realize only at the moment when the King
takes a bite and the flash-bulbs of the assembled press corps start
popping that Roosevelt has shown them the way to become modern
monarchs, “humanized” (as FDR himself is according to our present
decadent standards by his sexually predatory behavior) by sharing
the fare of the common people. The common people in the movie cheer
because they cannot yet see where such an apparently innocuous
entrée into the celebrity culture will end — that is with Monica
Lewinsky’s blue dress and cigars put to profane uses in the Oval
Office. Knowing better ourselves, we can only be touched by the
fatal innocence of the time and thus impressed with a historical
truth that goes well beyond the merely factual.
Hyde Park on Hudson is ultimately too slight a thing to
win the coveted Bowman Two Stars, but what it does it does very
well. The movie brings us not only Bill Murray as FDR but FDR as
Bill Murray and, given the subject matter and the careful purging
from the story of all but the most anodyne and uncontroversial sort
of politics — most people, I fancy, will approve of Roosevelt’s
tilt towards the British in the coming war against Hitler’s Germany
— both are entirely convincing. As celebrity, at any rate, which,
with the benefit of hindsight, we can imagine FDR’s being, the
president fits the Bill Murray persona and vice versa. FDR’s being
carried around by a muscular assistant while everybody pretends not
to notice is just the sort of thing that we can imagine Mr.
Murray’s doing. But the removal of politics also has its own
appropriateness on account its subject’s being FDR’s own attempt to
escape from politics. Daisy says during the early days of their
affair: “I believed I helped him forget the world — as if we had
just run away.”
Laura Linney as Daisy may be the only actress I know of who can
play plain or dowdy women without being in the least plain or dowdy
herself. In other words, her sexual magnetism shines through no
matter how much the part calls it into question or depends on a
backstory involving her loneliness or unattractiveness. When, in
Breach (2007)
she says to Ryan Phillippe’s character that she is no good as a
relationship counselor — “I don’t even have a cat” — we can
believe, for a moment at any rate, that this luminous beauty could
be so utterly alone. We can even believe that the best she can do
in You
Can Count on Me (2001) is a sleazy
extra-marital affair with the even sleazier Matthew Broderick. Poor
Daisy Suckley only died in 1991, at the age of 99, and surely
doesn’t deserve the Lewinsky-like portrayal she gets in this movie.
But I hope that, if she is looking down on it from among the other
ranks in celebrity heaven, she will think it some compensation that
she is being played on the celebrity-making big screen by such a
paragon of modern womanhood as Miss Linney.
