Portland Phoenix, 15 April 2005
By Joyce Millman
**Thanks, Deborah

HUMANIZED: Kenneth Branagh (here with Cynthia Nixon as Eleanor) may look nothing like FDR, but he captures Roosevelt's expansive patrician vigor by playing him as a smarter version of Gilderoy Lockhart from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

Before HBO got into the feature-film production biz, the term "TV movie" used to be a negative thing, and if you remember those made-for-TV message movies of the ’70s, you know why. Prime time was awash with "triumph of the human spirit" movies, docudramas in which courageous, liberal-minded individuals prevailed over bigotry, repression, and social injustice. In defense of this art form (and, I suppose, of the human spirit), I will set aside my cynicism and agree that, sometimes, people actually do noble things and their stories are worth telling.

Eighty-year-old director Joseph Sargent is the master of the TV movie well told, having won Emmys for Miss Evers’ Boys, A Lesson Before Dying, and last year’s Something the Lord Made. He has dedicated his long career to two themes — racism and anti-Semitism. And he specializes in finding little-known true stories with which to illuminate the struggle against these evils. His films are uplifting but seldom preachy or superficial.

His latest, Warm Springs (debuting April 30 at 8 p.m. on HBO), might seem a departure: it’s the true story of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s struggle to adjust to paralysis after being stricken with polio in 1921, at the age of 39. But Sargent’s crusading heart asserts itself here too. The scourge may not be racism or anti-Semitism, but the director depicts the prejudice with which FDR and other disabled individuals were treated as arising from similar ignorance and fear. Warm Springs treats FDR as a role model for the disabled first and one of the greatest leaders in history second. And that’s its main problem. His premise begs the question "Isn’t this just seeing the wheelchair and not the man?"

Warm Springs is not as fresh or as elegantly shaped as Sargent’s last HBO movie, the unsentimental yet heartfelt Something the Lord Made, which was about the white surgeon and the black lab technician who pioneered open-heart surgery despite the social strictures of the Jim Crow South. But it does humanize FDR for a generation unfamiliar with him except as the face on the dime. And that’s mostly due to British actor Kenneth Branagh’s vibrant performance. With his blunt features, Branagh looks nothing like FDR, but he does find a clever way to capture Roosevelt’s expansive patrician vigor. He plays him as a smarter version of Gilderoy Lockhart, the swaggering superstar wizard he portrayed in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Branagh’s pre-polio FDR is a wiz at the political photo op, appropriately larger than life even when he’s wallowing in post-illness depression. Unfortunately, Warm Springs grinds to a halt whenever Branagh is not on screen. As Eleanor Roosevelt, Cynthia Nixon is undone by a distracting pair of prosthetic buck teeth and an ill-considered attempt to approximate Eleanor’s high-pitched voice. Nixon is a terrific actress, but she doesn’t give a performance here, she does an imitation. You keep thinking, "Oh, it’s Miranda from Sex and the City at a costume party!"

Warm Springs begins with the image of a man whom we gradually realize is Branagh’s FDR swimming in a lake. But something is not right. When he’s lifted out of the water in a big fishing net, we see his atrophied legs. (This is accomplished through special effects.) FDR slumps on the dock with a smoke and a drink, and the first quarter of the movie lurches by in clunky flashback. We see the young FDR in constant motion, being groomed for a run for president, rassling on the lawn with his brood of kids, cheating on his mousy wife. He’s all privilege and virility. Then he gets polio and his life as a political star and (he believes) as a man is over. He’s forced to endure indignity; carried over people’s shoulders like a sack of potatoes, he laments, "I can’t even visit the bathroom without a team of associates to pull my pants down." He sinks into a depression that doesn’t lift until he’s invited to Warm Springs, a crumbling resort in backwoods Georgia owned by George Foster Peabody. Local legend claims that the waters can heal "cripples"; in fact, the mineral content of the springs make the water so buoyant that paralyzed persons can be held up enough to exercise their limbs.

FDR first sees Warm Springs through the eyes of a snob; he tells caretaker Tom Loyless (Tim Blake Nelson) that it ought to be condemned. But the straightforward and compassionate attitude of Tom and his largely poor black staff intrigues FDR, and he gives the waters a try. While he’s at Warm Springs, his political adviser, Louis Howe (David Paymer, wasted in a role that’s all exposition), decides to keep the Roosevelt name alive by grooming the shy, cowed Eleanor as a social reformer. This is where Margaret Nagle’s script picks up some momentum. Sargent is especially good at telling parallel stories, usually setting the personal within the larger story of the times. In Warm Springs, the parallels are FDR’s journey inward and Eleanor’s journey outward.

At Warm Springs, FDR regains some strength, and when his story gets out, the resort is beset by paralyzed polio and accident victims, for whom he’s become an inspiration. FDR is at first reluctant to be the poster boy for the wheelchair-bound. But when he sees the injustices heaped upon the disabled, he puts his energies and his personal fortune into making Warm Springs the center for new methods of rehabilitation. (He would return to Warm Springs throughout his four presidencies; he died there in 1945.) Meanwhile, Eleanor discovers her voice as an activist for social change and develops a following of her own. The estranged Roosevelts find their way back to each other as their personal journeys converge — she uses her clout to help FDR crash a convention of orthopedists in order to drum up investors for Warm Springs.

Warm Springs is an ode to FDR’s comeback from illness, but Sargent and Nagle also limn a darker, more complex story. When the influential first report on Warm Springs’ success rate is published and the evaluating doctor documents improvement in every patient but FDR, the future president flies into a rage. He admits to Eleanor his self-interest in championing Warm Springs: he wanted to walk again. When he returns to political life to place New York governor Al Smith’s name in nomination for the presidency at the 1928 Democratic National Convention, Sargent shows us (albeit briefly) the measures undertaken to hide the extent of his condition as an operative confiscates the camera of a photographer who had gotten a shot of FDR being carried through a back entrance.

And then there’s FDR’s "walk" to the podium at the convention as he leans on a cane and the arm of his son. As re-created in Warm Springs, it’s reminiscent of the controversial Super Bowl ad for Nuveen Investments in which, through special effects, Christopher Reeve appeared to rise from his wheelchair and walk. That commercial was cheered by some for its optimism, maligned by others for raising false hope and for Reeve’s seeming abandonment of the fight for the rights of the disabled in favor of healing himself. Warm Springs is bound to elicit the same kind of debate.