movie review: Bill Murray's "Hyde Park on Hudson"

Reviewing Hyde Park on Hudson is almost like reviewing two different movies.  The film is one part comedy of manners, and one part nostalgia drama, and while the comedic storyline works very well, the dramatic one doesn't.

The movie stars Bill Murray in a very unBillMurray-like performance as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  The movie never really presents events from FDR's point of view; in the comedic storyline, we see him through the eyes of the king and queen of England, while the drama is narrated by its main character, the President's distant cousin and would-be lover, Margaret "Daisy" Suckley.

In the comedic storyline -- which never forgets its serious undertones -- King George VI and Queen Elizabeth engage on the first ever royal visit to the United States, by visiting Roosevelt at his summer home (actually his mother's house) in Hyde Park, New York.  Officially, the king and queen have no agenda, although everyone knows that the purpose of their trip is to ask FDR for financial and military assistance in the inevitable war with Nazi Germany.  The king and queen's first scene, in which farmers prove indifferent to their majesties, nicely establishes the "fish out of water" feeling that the royals feel throughout their trip, and while the President is ostensibly courteous, he actually does little to set their minds at ease, and instead puts them through a serious of subtle psychological challenges, such as serving low-brow food at meals, and arranging for the royals to sleep in a room decorated with anti-British political cartoons depicting the War of 1812.

Many of these scenes are very funny.  This isn't the type of movie that aims to make you guffaw out loud, but I found plenty of opportunity for quiet chuckles and amused grins.  It's a fun, dry little comedy, watching the hapless king and queen try to determine just how many of Roosevelt's faux pas are deliberate and how many are not.  Samuel West is good as King George, but Olivia Colman is especially hilarious as the confused queen.  Keep in mind, though, that although this is played for laughs, the movie never seeks to ridicule these characters.  Their befuddlement is depicted not as incompetence, but as reasonable in the face of their treatment by the Roosevelt family, and the king and queen are, indeed, depicted more sympathetically than FDR himself.

In the more dramatic storyline, Laura Linney stars as the real-life Daisy, who hasn't seen distant cousin Roosevelt since a family reunion several years ago.  One day, she is called out of the blue, and asked to join him at his mother's house in Hyde Park.  He endears himself to her by showing her his stamp collection (which he later reveals to King George is a surprisingly reliable way to get women), and the two begin to engage in a close friendship that comes very, very close to, but (in this movie, anyway) never quite crosses the border into an outright sexual affair.

In the past, Laura Linney has proven herself an effective actress when asked to play strong women.  Here, however, she comes across as terribly bland.  The fault is not entirely hers, as the character is written with very little to make her interesting.  She does nothing interesting, says nothing interesting, thinks nothing interesting in the narration, and though the real-life Daisy Suckley's experiences must have been very interesting -- she was, after all, a nobody who, due to a twig-thin branch of her family tree, became intimately familiar with the most powerful man in the nation -- the character's acknowledgment of the wonder of it all barely registers.  Furthermore, she is depicted as being so naive -- not dumb in any other way, mind you, just incredibly naive -- that sometimes you really want to shake some sense into her.  For example, if you don't mind a minor spoiler (a very minor spoiler if you're familiar with history) at one point she is devastated to find that she is not the only woman having an affair with F.D.R.  Well, duh, lady, considering the sleazy way he seduced you in the first place, what did you expect?  Later, when she proves to have so little self-worth that she accepts being just one of many sleeping with the President, you really have to wonder what screenwriter Richard Nelson expects us to cling to in order to find any sympathy for Daisy at all.

As for the other performances, Samuel West is good as King George, Olivia Williams is even better as Eleanor Roosevelt, and I've already noted that Olivia Colman is absolutely brilliant as Queen Elizabeth.  At the center of it all is Bill Murray, who may not look or sound very much like Roosevelt, but he abandons all of his usual Murrayisms for what is a truly unique, compelling, likable performance.  If you think about it, Murray has spent nearly his entire career playing only very minor variations of himself.  Even back when he was a regular on SNL, where most cast members get to display their versatility, Murray's characters rarely strayed far from what became the Bill Murray Persona.  Here, however, he disappears completely into the role.

In the end, it's hard to say whether I recommend this film.  The scenes with the king and queen are definitely worth watching, but it is difficult to slog through the boring romance/ non-romance of the Daisy Suckley storyline.  Whether or not that all adds up to a recommendation, make of it what you will.

(One final note:  The depiction of the Roosevelts in this movie makes a shark contrast with the depiction of the Hitchcocks in the most recent film I reviewed, Hitchcock.  Whereas that movie went to great lengths to depict Alfred Hitchcock's wife as the true genius behind his work, Hyde Park on Hudson defies the historical tradition of depicting First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt as the Great Woman Behind the Great Man.  Here, Eleanor is surprisingly depicted as an asexual, nagging, socially awkward woman whose marriage to FDR is mostly for show.  That screenwriter Nelson still somehow manages to make the character likable in many ways is a testimony to considerably greater character development than he bothers with the more central character of Daisy.)

In Memory of Roger Ebert

I have followed Roger Ebert's career since before I even knew exactly what the word "journalism" means.  At Dad's house, it was a Christmas tradition to find the latest edition of Ebert's annually updated book of reviews under the tree.  This tradition started Christmas of 1989, when I was 14 years old, and continued until Dad died in 2000.

I always admired Ebert's writing, even when Ebert inadvertently made himself a bit of a punchline with his blatant sexuality, as, for a time, his reviews tended to focus on the physical attributes of their leading ladies.  Rudy and I used to laugh about how, during his 1997 interview with Pam Grier, Ebert admitted that, instead of paying attention to Grier's statements during the interview, "as she's talking, I'm checking her out."

I also began to grow wary of Ebert's own prejudices.  He was too dismissive of certain genres -- growing almost indiscriminately weary of action movies, and dismissing slasher films almost en masse, missing out on the deeper socio-contextual meanings found by such other critics as, say, Carol Clover.  I also eventually grew to disapprove of his reviews' increasing tendency to replace objective analysis with undefended, unchecked emotional response, a tendency which reached its most ludicrous point in 2008, when Ebert slammed the movie Tru Loved, only to later admit that he'd only watched a few minutes of the film.

That incident pissed me off so much that I did the unthinkable, and stopped reading Ebert reviews for a while.  But the thing is, my personal ban of Ebert reviews was on moral grounds, not because I stopped liking his writing.  As Ebert would often observe in various wording, a movie, or a movie review, should not be judged just based on what it's about, but also "how it's about it" (meaning how it's presented), and as a writer, Roger Ebert was simply fun to read.

In my mind, Ebert redeemed himself a bit in 2010, with his reviews of Hereafter and Kick-Ass.  At the time, I was annoyed that film critics almost unanimously slammed Hereafter, despite its earnest attempt to examine the topic of death from an intellectual point of view, something those very same critics almost daily complained that Hollywood films never do.  Ebert at least gave credit where credit was due.  This was not just a matter of me agreeing with Ebert's opinion, this was acknowledging that Ebert seemed to be the one professional critic whose review lacked hypocrisy.

Like Ebert, I was offended by the level of violence in Kick-Ass.  A lot of people disagreed with Ebert and me about Kick-Ass, insisting that it was innocent fun as much as any other action film is, but for Ebert and me, it just went too far, and I felt vindicated that Roger had the nerve to say, "mindless action movie violence is one thing, but this is just too much."

Ebert and I traded a few emails over the years through his "Answer Man" column submission webpage.  Most of these exchanges were, to various degrees, humorous and/or insightful on both of our parts, but the one that he chose to publish -- both in his book and on his website -- was one in which I had mistaken the director David Mirken for David Mament.  Sadly, you can read from the context of my letter that this was no mere typo on my part, I'd honestly, embarrassingly, confused the credits of the film.  Out of all the emails we traded, this was the one he published?

Still, no grudges.  I continued to read his website even after his health problems led Ebert to review fewer and fewer of the reviews appearing on the site, because I kept hoping, "maybe this time, it'll be a real Ebert review," and I was always delighted when he made an appearance -- even if, by the end, he was little more than a guest writer on his own site.

I will miss reading Roger Ebert reviews.  Even when I disagreed with him, even when he praised a film I hated or slammed a movie I loved, I always respected the way he went about it.