Hyde Park on Hudson is a lavish but drowsy and underpowered movie that never quite clicks into gear: it's like a midsummer weekend's comedy with all the comedy removed, leaving behind a weirdly oppressive sense of inactivity and discomfort. Of course, this might well be a faithful approximation of the real event it describes. But it's odd all the same.
The subject is a visit made in 1939 to US President Franklin D Roosevelt, at his country retreat in upstate New York, by Britain's nervous new King and Queen, Bertie and Elizabeth, hoping to secure American support for the imminent battle with Hitler. They are played by Samuel West and Olivia Colman, and FDR is genially, if casually impersonated by Bill Murray, who looks the part but is sorely lacking the sharp material that might have made his performance take off.
It doesn't have the entertainment factor or the dramatic oomph of Tom Hooper's award-winning The King's Speech, and the dramatic focus is fatally split between the royal visit and the president's tense, painful affair with his distant cousin Daisy, played by Laura Linney, whose character contributes a pedantic voiceover. I couldn't help feeling that the relationship between Daisy and FDR is where the real dramatic interest should have been. There are some sharp and unsentimental moments, particularly in the way Elizabeth is portrayed as a sour meanie who is suspicious of polyglot America and her hosts' attitude generally, particularly the ones she meets at a dinner laid on for them: "They're from Italy, Germany; they're Irish; they're Jewish, they want us to fall flat on our faces!" An interestingly dyspeptic portrayal, given what we know of the earlier royal enthusiasm for appeasement; it's nastier than audiences might expect – and for all we know, more accurate than Helena Bonham Carter's Elizabeth in The King's Speech. If Hyde Park on Hudson had continued in this sceptical vein, it might have been more interesting; as it is, the movie insists on an unearned sentimentality and nostalgia about a situation and a period that is never fully evoked or explored.
