City Arts: Presidents in Lust

Armond White — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 18:30:01 +0000

Historical man-sharing in ‘Hyde Park on Hudson’

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s deification–once the preoccupation of Depression and WWII survivors–comes to an end in Hyde Park on Hudson, a tell-all semi-bio-pic that is really about the women in FDR’s harem. Screenwriter Richard Nelson’s presumptuous aspersions present FDR’s wife Eleanor (Olivia Williams) as a lesbian, his secretary Missy (Elizabeth Marvel) as a pragmatic concubine and his fifth cousin Daisy (Laura Linney) as a self-sacrificing frump, the film’s sentimentalizing narrator.

Bill Murray as FDR in Hyde Park on Hudson

What’s going on here outdoes the hero-worship of films like The Queen, The Last King of Scotland, The King’s Speech; there’s a new cynicism that accepts the failings of political leaders, adjusting public disappointment to decadent approval–uncannily like the rehabilitation of Bill Clinton at the recent Democratic National Convention; his all-is-forgiven adoration where a former sex-scoundrel President’s absolution led the way to a current President’s consecration.

In Hyde Park on Hudson, Roosevelt’s perfidy becomes a quasi-feminist standard where women submit to a dominant male’s peccadilloes out of sexual and patriotic fealty. An idiosyncratic genius like Ken Russell might have exulted in the perversity of such arrangements, but Roger Michell’s technique is so drab, he simply accepts the historical perversion as part of dull revisionism. Linney’s Cousin Daisy is too bland to hold FDR to any accounting; she accepts her lot like a worshipful electorate.

Using the visit of stuttering King George (played by Samuel West) to a diplomatic Upstate New York picnic where he is forced to swallow the American delicacy hot dogs, Michell’s film idealizes hero-worship through a metaphorical act of consumption. FDR commands “Show him how we put on the mustard”–a symbolic slathering of compliment/condiment on phallic privilege. This is the Monica Lewinsky film Hollywood has been reluctant to make.

Murray’s clever yet bland FDR impersonation is negligible and Linney’s quasi-incestuous mistress bores. After giving FDR a hand-job, her moment of conscience occurs in a voyeuristic sequence of interminable, unwatchable day-for-photography. She describes an era “When the world allowed itself secrets” no different from today but it’s a way of admitting the dishonesty we accept while pretending it doesn’t exist. Hyde Park on Hudsonmay be a signal movie of the laissez faire Obama era. (Like the Cahiers du Cinema’s famous deconstruction ofYoung Mr. Lincoln, the President’s phallus is this film’s structuring absence.) Yet it’s also one of the most nauseating films of the year.

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Get Low

admin — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 15:59:48 +0000

By Armond White

Faking Americana, Get Low tells the tale of a 1920s backwoods loner named Bush (Robert Duvall) who seeks a funeral (“It’s time to get low”) before he dies. Director Aaron Schneider’s feature debut is so naive about small-town life and rural habits that he misses the humor in this premise. It seems stolen from either Bret Harte or Mark Twain, yet Schneider has fallen for that familiar Hollywood con: “Based on a true story.”

Luckily, Schneider cast actors who hold on to their sense of humor. Bill Murray inimitably plays the undertaker willing to give Bush his request. (“Hermit money, that’s good!”) Murray, wearing a John Waters mustache, authenticates the weariness and desperation of the era. He forms a solid, unsentimental relationship with his young assistant, the purely charming Lucas Black, whom he tells, “You’ll never be good if you don’t know that you are,” and provides the film its best moment: a confrontation between his alcoholic Irish undertaker and an elderly black preacher (Bill Cobb). They argue over Bush’s motives, about what he “will” or “can’t” do. Murray and Cobb find the basic cultural differences of white and black perspectives on social expectation. It’s a rich, deeply funny, subtly acted scene.

And then there’s Duvall’s Bush. Duvall goes from wild-haired, scary hermit (as if repeating his inscrutable role in Altman’s The Gingerbread Man) to being a cagey manipulator. Bush has punished himself for an indiscretion many years ago (involving Sissy Spacek as an old flame), but doesn’t know how to purge or forgive himself publicly or privately. His funeral ruse attempts to repair the personal and community damage, but Schneider’s awkward plotting forgets points and turns the occasion into grandstanding vanity—which Duvall takes to the bank.

Duvall’s final scene is an oration before the entire town and surrounding community where he explains, “Good, bad, right, wrong aren’t miles apart. Truth is they’re tangled up with each other,” which also holds for this performance. Duvall’s great skill verges on genius; he exposes Bush’s inner ache, then delivers it. Like Vanessa Redgrave’s amazing summary appearance at the end of Atonement, Duvall achieves a recognizable, mature anguish that makes Schneider’s rickety contrivance seem momentarily real. Still, Get Low is annoyingly contrived. It’s got miracle-worker actors, but only a miracle-worker director could pull off this drivel.
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Get Low
Directed by Aaron Schneider
Runtime: 100 min.

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City Arts: Presidents in Lust

Get Low