HBO Movie "Warm Springs"

So it's been almost a year since my last posting....Shoot me.

On the movie watching front, the latest one I saw was "Warm Springs" by HBO Films starring Kenneth Branagh and Cynthia Nixon last night at the Chicago AMC River East.

It was good!

Kenneth Branagh can always be depended upon to give an amazing complex performance and he has yet to disappoint. Cynthia Nixon was the surprise casting here as Eleanor Roosevelt. At first it seemed a really strange choice but as you watch her you get the feeling that she wasn't cast so much because she was "one of the Sex and the City girls" but because she would actually bring something new and interesting to the portrayal of Eleanor. From what little I knew of Eleanor Roosevelt I had always imagined that she was quite the out-spoken staunch woman's rights advocate but I learned that she was actually quite shy and initially didn't like to speak in public.
My friend Meredith who went with me also told me that Eleanor Roosevelt was a lesbian, that she and Franklin D. Roosevelt were distant cousins and related to Theodore Roosevelt, and that Franklin Roosevelt had a mistress even when he was in the White House!

But none of that was revealed in the movie. The movie covered the years after Franklin Roosevelt contracted polio but before he was elected President. How he went through depression and self-loathing as he searched for anything that would make him walk again. Through that quest he ended up in a run-down place in Georgia where through meeting other polio victims of all ages, sizes, races, gender, etc. etc. etc. He re-discovered his compassion for others and his desire to help do what he could all while having to come to terms with the horrible idea of never being able to walk again.

It was interesting to watch the struggle between the man's ego and his capabilities, between what he wanted for himself and how he felt compelled to help those even more "unfortunate" then himself. Not to mention another aspect of the freedom vs. restriction that being born into "High Society" money can place on a person. Kenneth Branagh really portrayed the struggles of the conflicting points and yet simultaneously showed how those conflicting points could both compel a person while they despaired at the same time. Very complex and emotional without pandering too much to the sympathies or patronizing the audience.

Definitely worth a rental viewing or watching during one of it's many runs on HBO. =-)