Mondo Cinema
Bill Murray channels FDR in Hyde Park on the Hudson, Marion Cotillard gets Oscarbuzz in Rust and Bone
Marion Cotillard will likely get another Oscar nomination for her starring rolein Rust and Bone.Courtesy photo
Bill Murray portrays President Franklin Roosevelt in Hyde Park on the HudsonPhoto courtesy of Lone Star Film Society
Edward Burns wrote, directed and starred in The Fitzgerald Family Christmas
To answer the most obvious question first: No, you won't have any trouble at all buying Bill Murray as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Hyde Park on Hudson(at the Regal Greenway Grand Palace), a seriocomic portrait of the POTUS as an aging horndog.
Granted, Murray doesn't do much more than flatten his vowels here and there — and occasionally adjust his pince-nez while a cigarette holder dangles rakishly from his lips — to hard-sell the verisimilitude. But never mind: Not unlike Frank Langella in Frost/Nixon, he credibly and compellingly conveys the essence — or at least what most of us have come to believe is the essence — of the icon he's portraying here.
A Frost/Nixon comparison also is applicable to the central conceit at the heart of this handsomely produced period drama directed by Roger Michell (Notting Hill, Changing Lanes) and written by Richard Nelson.
Hyde Park on Hudson is fascinating and often quite funny as it examines how a unique relationship between men solidified a “special relationship” between countries.
Peter Morgan's screenplay (based on his own stage play) for Ron Howard's underrated 2008 film pivoted on the thought-provoking, dramatically satisfying supposition that both British TV personality David Frost (Michael Sheen) and disgraced former president Richard Nixon (Langella) approached their legendary TV interviews with similarly self-serving goals of image enhancement.
In Hyde Park on Hudson, we have a cheerily paternal FDR playing host to an anxious young King George VI (Samuel West) — and his wife, the Queen Consort Elizabeth (Olivia Colman) — in June 1939 at the upstate New York enclave that gives the movie its title. It's a very special occasion — and not just because no British royals had ever previously visited America.
King George dearly hopes to bolster U.S. support for the United Kingdom during what appears to be an inevitable war with Germany. (Sure enough, three months later, Germany invaded Poland.) At first, however, he feels awkward in his dealings with FDR — and self-conscious about his stutter. (Evidently, Geoffrey Rush — er, I mean, Lionel Logue — hasn't yet completed the speech therapy sessions detailed in The King’s Speech.)
And while Elizabeth means well, she doesn't do much to boost her husband's confidence by repeatedly chiding him for his stammer and comparing him, unfavorably, to his more charismatic brother, who might still be King of England if he hadn't fallen in love.
The best scenes in Hyde Park on Hudson are those that focus on the untested king and the fatherly president — that show how acutely aware they are of the burdens they bear and the images they must maintain — while these two very public figures share confidences about their private lives and inner doubts.
To be sure, there's something perhaps a tad too neat about the ice-breaking moment when each man acknowledges his handicap. ("This goddamn stutter!" "This goddamn polio!"). And, yes, just as the real David Frost wasn't quite the journalistic lightweight that Morgan depicts in his drama, the real King George wasn't that much younger than FDR in 1939. (The king was 43, going on 44, while the president was 57.)
But, again, never mind: Hyde Park on Hudson is fascinating and often quite funny as it examines how a unique relationship between men solidified a "special relationship" between countries. And it subtly but effectively amuses by noting the irony that just as one man finally earns the respect of the most important woman in his life, the other — FDR — continues to muddle through complicated relationships with the women in his own orbit.
Unfortunately, most of Hyde Park on Hudson isn't about the bonding of world leaders, but instead about . . . Well, those women in FDR's life.
Specifically, the movie devotes the bulk of its running time to the relationship between FDR and Margaret Suckley (Laura Linney), a distant cousin who becomes the president's very, very close acquaintance shortly before the royal visit.
Even more specifically, the movie is intended primarily as Margaret's story: How she fell under FDR's spell, and how she was hurt when she discovered how many other women — in addition to FDR’s wife, Eleanor, played by Olivia Williams — had enjoyed (or were still enjoying) the same, ahem, easy access to the president.
"My husband," Eleanor pointedly remarks, "lives for the adoring eyes of young women."
(Remember my remark about "aging horndog" in the first paragraph? That really wasn't much of an exaggeration.)
Hell, Margaret — a real-life figure whose private journals and diaries inspired Richard Nelson's script — even serves as the movie's narrator, despite the fact that she's nowhere around when key events occur. (Sure, maybe FDR told her after the fact about his conversations with George. But what about George's private conversations with Elizabeth?)
With all due respect to Laura Linney — a fine actress who is, as usual, splendid — Margaret's story, while not uninteresting, really isn't interesting enough to lay just claim to as much time as it gets in Hyde Park on Hudson. Maybe I'll watch the movie again someday on DVD. When I do, however, I suspect I'll be doing quite a bit of fast-forwarding.
Screens like old times
The Fitzgerald Family Christmas is the first movie by writer-director-star Edward Burns to have a theatrical release in quite some time. (You can see it Sunday night at 14 Pews.) That doesn’t mean Burns – who first attracted attention as an indie filmmaker 17 years ago with The Brothers McMullen —hasn't been keeping active as an auteur. But it does mean that, these days, he doesn't think big screens are such big deals.
"If you’re an indie filmmaker," he told me last September at the Toronto Film Festival, "you have to fall out of love with theatrical. It is a business model that no longer works – at least for the producers and filmmakers. The distribution companies will all admit to you that theatrical is a loss leader, and that now, rather than a lucrative revenue stream, it is a marketing tool to help all the other revenue streams like VOD and foreign sales and pay-cable sales, and even DVD."
The Fitzgerald Family Christmas is the first movie by writer-director-star Edward Burns to have a theatrical release in quite some time.
Which is why Burns' last few flicks — including Purple Violets and The Groomsmen — premiered as iTunes offerings and/or DVD fare. Indeed, even Fitzgerald Family Christmas was available as a video on demand item weeks before it opened theatrically in New York earlier this month.
"We decided to forego theatrical," Burns said, "and just focus on these new revenue streams. And while I'm not going to say it's a million-dollar business — for the first time since The Brothers McMullen, I'm making money making independent films."
The only downside: Most VOD, iTunes and direct-to-video releases never get reviewed by major film critics. (Snobbery? Maybe. Is that likely to change in the future? Almost certainly.) On the other hand, Fitzgerald Family Christmas got a very favorable review from the discerning Stephen Holden of The New York Times.
So I tweeted Burns to ask how he felt about that. His reply? "Feels pretty good, I got to admit."
Other movies, other screens
Academy Award winner Marion Cotillard (La Vie en Rose) is generating Oscar buzz again, this time for Rust and Bone (at the River Oaks 3), Jacques Audiard's erotically charged drama about an unemployed father and budding kickboxer (Matthias Schoenaerts) who falls in love with a beautiful woman who trains killer whales at a marine tourist park. Unfortunately, fate has a few hard knocks in store for both of them.
Meanwhile, over at the AMC Studio 30, a hardboiled cop (Indian superstar Salman Khan) has an even harder time of it in while tangling with a corrupt politician in Dabangg 2, a Bollywood action drama (with songs) that is, you may not be surprised to learn, the sequel to a 2010 action drama titled Dabangg.
