There has been a rash of historical biopics with Paul Thomas Anderson’s “The Master” and Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” and representing recent forays into the genre, Robert Michell’s “Hyde Park on Hudson” is in the right place and time to profit from the association.
Unfortunately, Michell’s film lacks all the qualities that separated Anderson and Spielberg’s films: energetic, vibrant and raw individual performances in “The Master” and the sly, nuanced storytelling in “Lincoln.” To be blunt, “Hyde Park on Hudson” is a mess.
Bill Murray is admittedly charming as Franklin D. Roosevelt, but it never seems like he encompasses Roosevelt. Murray is a toothy, winking rogue throughout and is enjoyable to watch, but only to a point. There is no depth to his performance, and the same is true of the film.
Laura Linney, who portrays Margaret Suckley, a historical character whose correspondences with Roosevelt, detailing their intimate relationship, were made famous after her death. Linney is moderately strong in the early going, but fades as an interesting, relatable character in the third act.
Samuel West, who plays the intimidated, stuttering and young King George VI forced by circumstances to travel to America to seek Roosevelt and America’s aid against the looming threat of German aggression, is an island of heart and subtlety in a sea of blasé and lifeless performances.
The problem is that the alternative-lifestyle romantic relationship between Suckley and Roosevelt is the wrong lens through which to view the larger, historical events transpiring. Michell’s direction and Richard Nelson’s screenplay seek to juxtapose the scope and magnitude of world events with the backdrop of the rustic, quasi-incestuous dynamic between the two leads, but it feels inappropriate and misguided.
The film does make a very poignant point about the nature of discourse and media in that era with the last shot of the film showing a horde of paparazzi patiently waiting for Roosevelt to situate his disabled legs into his limousine before snapping inaccurate photographs of him. Roosevelt is idolized, knowingly so by the entire nation, and the film opines that the Roosevelt era was when Americans knew the value of keeping secrets and constructing an image that reflected the best, not the reality.
But the moments of significance are sadly drowned out by an unrelenting mediocrity permeating every shot, performance and moment of the film. The movie just isn’t provocative enough to inspire any kind of epiphany about the human situation, and it fails in most of its attempts to stray beyond the superficial.
