Channeling adversity

When Shakespearean actor Kenneth Branagh went to research Franklin Delano Roosevelt for HBO’s drama “Warm Springs,” airing Saturday, he found no shortage of officially sanctioned photographs, scholarly tomes on his influence and tape recordings of famous oratorical speeches. But there was little to nothing about FDR’s inner life, private moments or physical movements to inform a nuanced portrayal of the future president during the often overlooked emotional and life-altering years (1924 to 1928) he spent at a dilapidated mineral spa in Warm Springs, Ga., after he contracted polio. Gregarious yet emotionally removed, Roosevelt had gone to great lengths to hide his feelings and any lasting evidence of the paralysis that left his legs useless except to transmit pain.

Fortunately, Branagh said, a director friend from England knew of a four-second snippet of film included in a 1980s British documentary that showed the waddle FDR created to convince the press and the public that he had recovered some use of his legs. The image clearly was not meant to survive, as a Secret Service agent blocks the lens just as the clip ends.

“I must have played it a thousand times,” Branagh said recently in Beverly Hills, where he had come for the show’s premiere. Accompanied by people who live with disabilities similar to FDR’s, Branagh watched that clip at the therapeutic rehabilitation institute that FDR developed at Warm Springs after he bought the spa. “They said, ‘This is what we think he’s doing. OK. Stand here. Get the leg braces on. You’re moving your right shoulder and you’re dragging this foot. You’re using gravity actually, and you’re using the pull to move one leg forward.’ He had to learn to balance on the stick and swing it around. When you see the footage, it’s almost Chaplinesque.

“He sweated profusely, which is one reason he couldn’t do it for very long.”

Branagh said he compared his own videotaped efforts continually with the four-second clip until it looked right. Completing the illusion, Branagh’s “Celtic rugby player legs” were replaced in certain scenes by either thinner prosthetics, the legs of a paraplegic stand-in or state-of-the-art computer-generated images.

Directed by Joseph Sargent, “Warm Springs” also stars Cynthia Nixon as Eleanor Roosevelt, Jane Alexander (who played Eleanor in two 1970s miniseries, “Eleanor and Franklin” and “Eleanor and Franklin: The White House Years”) as Roosevelt’s mother, Kathy Bates as Roosevelt’s physical therapist, Tim Blake Nelson as the innkeeper and David Paymer as Louis Howe, Roosevelt’s political consultant who pushed him to resume his political career.

The film follows Roosevelt from the shock of getting polio at age 39 through an initial depression and tumultuous emotional recovery at Warm Springs, his last stop in a fruitless quest for a miracle cure. “One of the things the film looks at is the way in which that circumstance and that profound change possibly opened him up to a sort of more direct contact with his emotional life and expressing it,” Branagh said. “He went through the great arc of reactions in the wake of this kind of trauma -- tremendous depression, tremendous anger, apathy and the desire to give up.”

In order to pursue the White House, Roosevelt adopted a “tremendous functional denial” about his permanent disability, Branagh said. Rather than complain, he put his energy into managing and carefully measuring out the few moments he could risk a walk in public. The film dramatizes FDR’s first public walk at the 1928 Democratic National Convention when he put Al Smith’s name in nomination. “I think their hearts were in their mouths,” Branagh said. “One fall, one stumble and it would have been all over for him.”

Weaving fact and fiction

The film was shot on location in Atlanta and at Warm Springs, where Roosevelt eventually had a “Little White House” and to which he returned at least once a year every year except 1942. He died there April 12, 1945.

The script was written by first-time screenwriter Margaret Nagle, who grew up with a disabled brother. It was shopped around at all the major film studios before finding a home at HBO.

Several historians including Michael Beschloss and Ted Sorensen consulted on the script, which does not invent any characters. Nagle said she drew on her own research and her own experiences with disability and summer camps for isolated ill children to imagine intimate scenes and dialogue, such as when Roosevelt learns his friend Tom Loyless (Nelson) has terminal cancer. Roosevelt says, “You never pitied me.” Loyless responds, “Pity you? I envy you.”

Executive producer Mark Gordon said, “I think it’s important to keep in mind this is not a documentary, not an educational film. It’s a piece of entertainment.”

The story touches only briefly on FDR’s pre-polio affair with Lucy Mercer, who was with him at Warm Springs when he died. His relationship with Eleanor is depicted in the film as close and almost sentimental, which some say did not match the separate lives they led. “It’s true that [after the affair] they led more separate lives. It’s also true that even in the wake of betrayal, in her personal ministrations to him at the time and afterwards, she was committed and devoted,” Branagh said.

Gordon said Branagh was his first choice to play FDR. “Roosevelt was aristocratic, he was arrogant, particularly in the beginning of his life. He had enormous strength, was extremely intelligent and very charismatic. Ken embodies all those qualities. What he manages to do is to become Roosevelt without doing a caricature.”

As a Brit, Branagh had a natural affinity for Roosevelt’s speech, a mid-Atlantic accent, marked by soft Rs, that was popular at the time among upper classes. (“The only thing we have to fe-ah, is fe-ah itself.”)

Branagh said it was a challenge to find Roosevelt’s private voice, since his public voice was overly rhetorical, rising at the end of each sentence. “Cynthia and I joked about what life might be like at home,” he said, imitating the orator’s speech: “I’ll have a whis-KEY and some SO-DA.” To catch his private side, he watched amateur film footage of FDR at Warm Springs, playing in the pool, cheerleading for the others, looking “deliriously happy.”

“It felt to me in these unguarded personal moments when this huge personal charm was very clear, not a courtly East Coast patrician charm but just a fellow, that he was good company. He had a sort of goofy side to him. He was a man with a genuine twinkle in his eye, not an affected one.”

At the same time, Branagh said, many people felt that his charm was a brilliant front for keeping people at a distance. “He appeared to be all things to all men, and then at the same time, after he’d make some joke or say some charming thing, he’d suddenly disappear. People attribute it to a need for self-sufficiency he had as an only child. He went to school late, didn’t fit in quite as much as he wanted to. He famously didn’t get into the exclusive Harvard Club as his father had done and he actually referred to it as one of the most disappointing things that happened to him. There was still a sense of the outsider, someone isolated, sort of emotionally removed.”

Working among the disabled in Warm Springs was a curious experience, Branagh said. “The re-creation of what he did makes you feel two things: one, you become passionately determined to get it right for them and for him. But at the same time, when you walk away, it’s obviously a pretty humbling experience. It really made me understand, it really made you count your blessings.”