Branagh makes a credible FDR

April 29, 2005|Globe Staff

Adversity remade into triumph. It is, of course, the oldest plot in the ''Inspirational Film" book, that fat tome on the shelf beside ''How to Tap Sap." The familiar arc goes like this: Give a person a crippling illness. Throw him into a spiral of self-pity. Evolve him into a noble hero. Put big lumps in viewers' throats.

Too often in entertainment, suffering is reduced to an easy lesson in character building. It gets cut down into dime-store uplift. But when the pain-to-gain genre is done right, and HBO's FDR drama ''Warm Springs" is right enough, it can isolate and honor the redemptive potential of hard times. It can almost make you feel that there's some virtue in grief, despite the reality once named by poet Randall Jarrell, who wrote, ''Pain comes from the darkness / And we call it wisdom. It is pain."

''Warm Springs," which premieres tomorrow at 8 p.m., argues that suffering was the critical element in what ultimately made President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Kenneth Branagh) a man of greatness. The movie's little-known chapter of history starts with Roosevelt's journey into a hard-drinking depression after he contracts polio at age 39, in the middle of a political career that had already included an unsuccessful run for vice president. And it ends with his return to public life, renewed and spiritually enlarged, a tree with stronger roots after withstanding the gales of winter. He grows from a glad-handing aristocrat into a deeper man of the people, destined to serve four terms as the leader of the country.

In between those two ends, ''Warm Springs" shows Roosevelt shedding his despair and finding hope and willpower at a rundown spa in rural Warm Springs, Ga. In constant pain, he became physically buoyed by the mineral-rich waters there, which were said to benefit those with polio. But he was also emotionally awakened by the culture of the backwoods South -- by the poverty, by an intimacy with black people still afraid for their lives, by a close-up view of the less fortunate. For the first time in his life, he was grouped with social outsiders, since people with polio were often feared back then. Warm Springs became the one place where he didn't see pity or disgust in people's eyes, as they watched him struggle with his braces and misshapen legs.