Warm Springs [DVD]

Movie / Show Details

Product Description

As the only U.S. president re-elected three times, he brilliantly led America through the Great Depression and World War II. But the toughest challenge Franklin Delano Roosevelt ever faced was one the country never saw. Kenneth Branagh stars in this stirring true story of Roosevelt’s battle after being left a paraplegic by polio in 1921. Cynthia Nixon plays his dedicated wife Eleanor, who took up the mantle of the public FDR while her husband sought out a “miracle” cure in a rural Georgia health spa. Also with Kathy Bates and David Paymer. Directed by Joseph Sargent (HBO’s Something the Lord Made).
Bonus Content:

Audio Commentary: Audio commentaries with director Joseph Sargent and writer Margaret Nagle ]]>

Amazon.com

Warm Springs is a riveting, deeply moving film about a lesser-known chapter in the life of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the American president who saw his country through the dark, terrible times of the Great Depression and most of World War II. Before those epochal events, however, Roosevelt spent time in a political wilderness, groomed for high office but struck down by polio at age 39. Warm Springs is the fascinating story of Roosevelt’s painful journey from despair back to wisdom and leadership. Kenneth Branagh gives an emotionally raw, courageous performance as FDR, estranged from his wife, Eleanor (a near-luminous Cynthia Nixon), and his political guru (David Paymer) while ambivalently seeking rehabilitation at Warm Springs, a broken-down spa in the backwoods of Georgia. Mired in misery, misanthropy, and drink, Roosevelt is coaxed back to civilized behavior and a glimmer of altruism by the spa’s ailing, folksy manager, Tom Loyless (a remarkable Tim Blake Nelson), and the ministrations of a progressive-minded, physical therapist (solid work by Kathy Bates). Word of Roosevelt’s improvement in the buoyant, mineral-rich waters of Warm Springs draws other polio victims–some of whom endure terrible discrimination and misery while traveling—to the spa. In time, these hopeful, all-ages paraplegics form a community that inspires a sense of mission in Roosevelt, setting the stage for his return to the political arena. Surehanded, 80-year-old veteran director Joseph Sargent (on a roll following his lovely, 2004 cable movie Something the Lord Made) has made a pitch-perfect and intimate, historical drama one never wants to see end. –Tom Keogh