Roger Michell (2012)

The preliminaries for this ‘centrepiece gala’ of the London Film Festival were good, and better than they might have been:  Boris Johnson had given last-minute apologies for absence.   Roger Michell winningly said he was sorry the audience would be missing The Great British Bake Off final by attending the premiere of Hyde Park on Hudson.  Bill Murray added a few, funny words.  After that, though, it was all downhill.  It’s soon evident that Hyde Park on Hudson doesn’t have a strong motor and its first scenes don’t give much reason to hope that subtlety will compensate for lack of momentum.  It takes a bit longer, however, to work out quite what’s wrong with the film.  This dramatisation of the friendship and affair between Franklin D Roosevelt (Murray) and his distant cousin – ‘fifth or sixth removed … depending how you count’ – Margaret ‘Daisy’ Suckley (Laura Linney) is narrated by Daisy.  There’s a lot of voiceover in the early stages, and what’s on the screen isn’t much more than visual confirmation of what’s already being explained on the soundtrack.  But the fundamental weaknesses of Richard Nelson’s screenplay and Roger Michell’s direction become clear only with the arrival, for a short visit to Hyde Park on Hudson (FDR’s mother’s house, where the President took his holidays from Washington), of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth – a visit that takes place a few weeks before the outbreak of war in Europe, in the summer of 1939.

At this point the film resolves itself into a series of behind-closed-doors dialogues:  between FDR and the King (Samuel West), with the polio victim reassuring the stutterer that he too can overcome his disability; between the King and Queen in their bedroom, Elizabeth anxiously alert to signs of the Roosevelts slighting them both, and Bertie especially; inside a car, where Missy (Elizabeth Marvel), Roosevelt’s secretary, enlightens Daisy on the subject of being the President’s mistress.   The first two of these conversations are entertaining – you feel as if you’re eavesdropping on the private talk of public figures, and the royal paranoia about being looked down upon is, with Olivia Colman playing Queen Elizabeth, quite funny and touching.   There’s a farcical quality to the comings and goings through the night and the early morning which lifts the movie’s even, dawdling pace.  But Daisy’s running through the woods to get away from Missy and a man on FDR’s staff is visually dynamic in a rather desperate way (as if Michell knows he needs an injection of pace and isn’t too concerned about how that’s achieved); and the subsequent conversation with Missy in the car is familiar from other movies which describe the naivete of paramours who think they’re special.  It seems crucial in Hyde Park on Hudson that the unknown figure of Daisy Suckley should be the main focus of interest, and she’s not.  According to legends on the screen at the end of the movie, Daisy’s relationship with Roosevelt came to light only when she died, in her hundredth year, in 1991, when letters to and from FDR were discovered among her possessions.  Richard Nelson first wrote Hyde Park on Hudson as a radio play, broadcast on Radio 3 in 2009:  I don’t know whether this comprised readings from the letters but you can see how the story might work in epistolary form.  Without that framework, there’s not enough material for a drama – or at least Nelson doesn’t have the imagination to build one.  Laura Linney is a fine actress and she plays the attentive, self-consciously spinsterly Daisy with a lot of skill but the role is too thinly written for her to develop much.   Daisy is someone on the margins of the high-powered company assembled at Hyde Park on Hudson, and that’s how she stays in the movie which is meant to be her story.

Bill Murray inhabits FDR persuasively – he’s not only witty but good too at suggesting a man well practised in showing people what he wants them to see and keeping plenty in reserve.   As Eleanor Roosevelt, Olivia Williams seems too sharply aggressive at first but she settles down to give a good performance:  Eleanor is briskly affable, knowing it’s part of the job, but clearly bored by the social parts of that job and smilingly condescending towards the British visitors.   (The film implies that FDR’s extra-marital interests were something his wife was well used to – I don’t know whether there’s evidence for this.)   Olivia Colman’s Elizabeth is a passionately loyal, not very bright woman – it’s easier to believe with her than it was with Helena Bonham-Carter’s Queen Elizabeth that she grew into the Queen Mother.  A more surprising success is Samuel West’s Bertie.  Only two years after The King’s Speech (and with Madonna’s WE, which I’ve not seen, in between), you’d think it would be hard to do anything distinctive with George VI but West does, and humorously.   FDR’s mother Sara Delano is determined to make the most of hosting a royal visit and Elizabeth Wilson, who plays her, emphatically makes the most of the part.  So does Eleanor Bron, in the even smaller role of Daisy’s aunt.

16 October 2012