Hyde Park on Hudson

99% Fabrication; Read The Book Instead
I want to thank the producers of this god-awful film for sending me running to Geoffrey Ward's "Closest Companion," the edited version of Daisy Suckley's diaries and the Suckley-Roosevelt correspondence that tells the real story of their special friendship. Having read many accounts of the Roosevelt administration and New Deal, including bios of FDR (Kearns Goodwin, Smith) and Eleanor (Wieson Cook), I was looking forward to "Hyde Park on the Hudson" I admire Murray and Linney, whose talents are wasted on this turgid, maudlin soap opera that takes heaps and heaps of liberties with history, distorting the characters of all concerned -- Suckley, FDR, Eleanor and the Royals -- and depicting and conflicts that almost certainly did not -- as certain as we can be w/o having been there, which these producers most assuredly were not -- occur.

Suckley was an upper-crust Hudson Valley lady, a sixth cousin of FDR, who become his devoted companion and best friend. Although they had...

A Little Summer Music
Two noticeable aspects on this site - the paucity of reviews of this period piece film and the number of negative comments that seem to blanket the responses to this very quiet little recreation of a moment in history about which few may be aware. In many ways this film, as written by Richard Nelson and directed by Roger Michell, resembles a little European art film: the recreation of conditions in the USA in the post Depression era are remarkably apt and set a fine tenor for the story (including the musical score!). In the end this is a tale about how men in powerful places interrelate in moments of tension and how those same men have flaws both physical and in character that would weigh down ordinary fellows. But the story is about a particular summer in when Britain, on the brink of war with Hitler, visited America, hoping for Allied assistance in the war that was to become World War II.

The setting is the home away form the White House - Hyde Park on the Hudson, the...

Film can't make up its mind about which story it's telling, but Bill Murray shines as FDR
Hyde Park On Hudson is something of a problematic film, an uneven mix of some excellent performances and cinematography dragged down by a schizoid screenplay that can't seem to make up its mind which of two stories it's trying to tell: Margaret "Daisy" Suckley's long-term relationship with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt as his mistress (or one of them, anyway), or the historic visit of King George VI to meet with FDR on the eve of WWII, the first time a reigning British monarch had ever visited the US. Either would've made an interesting story, but in Hyde Park On Hudson, they end up working at cross purposes, leaving the whole disappointingly less than of the sum of its parts.

The film begins in the early 1930's when Daisy (Laura Linney) is unexpectedly summoned by FDR's formidable mother, Sara (Elizabeth Wilson) to their home, Springwood, in Hyde Park, New York, to be a personal assistant to Franklin (Bill Murray in a truly remarkable performance). Daisy, a spinster...

Click to Editorial Reviews