Warm Springs (HBO-2005)

Here is the abridged review (and the only one I've written) of Warm Springs, the 2005 HBO movie about the eight- to ten-year runup to Franklin D. Roosevelt's run for U.S. president, to wit, his involvement in the movement to treat and rehabilitate his fellow citizens who, like himself, were paralyzed by the devastating polio epidemic in the early decades of the twentieth century. First as a patient and eventually as its owner at Warm Springs, Georgia, Roosevelt became a champion of his fellow sufferers and found his own will to survive and then flourish. It is a story we've rarely heard, and whether or not the producers have gilded its lily, it makes a beautiful movie. Kenneth Branagh gives us an ambitious, successful, and extraordinarily gifted and big-hearted upper-class man of the people. How much Branagh's FDR resembles the original finally matters less, at least to me, than his full-bodied and nuanced characterization of a driven, then shattered, man who must reinvent himself in order to carry on. That FDR rose from a state of near total despair eventually to run and be elected an unprecedented four times for President provides heady grist for the mill of imagination. This story, in Branagh's hands, is poignant and inspiring with only a slight hint of sentimentality. And he is supported by a strong and elegant script, lush cinematography, and a fine set of perfectly pitched performances by Cynthia Nixon as Eleanor (or "Babs" to Franklin) (actually hers is not my favorite performance; she seemed to be working too hard); Tim Blake Nelson, as the Warm Springs manager who becomes a trusted friend and ally; David Paymer, his perseverant political manager; Kathy Bates, a physical therapist who joins forces to make Warm Springs widely available to polio patients; and Jane Alexander, the cold and overbearing matriarch of Hyde Park. This is a little slice of revisionism that appeals to our desire to have heroes, of whom there have been precious few since FDR.