The core of the story of Hyde Park on Hudson, premiering September 10 at the Toronto International Film Festival, is how Franklin Delano Roosevelt coped with the immense pressures of his office as he pulled the United States out of the Great Depression while the Second World War threatened and how he alleviated the additional tensions created by polio and by his not altogether functional marriage. The setting is the visit to the United States of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth (better remembered now as the Queen Mother), in 1939.

Roosevelt had a domineering mother, who in 1939 had been a widow for 39 years. Sara Delano Roosevelt doted on her only child, but sometimes took issue with him over matters that went on in what was, after all, her house. The complicated marriage with Eleanor had only been launched in 1905 because Eleanor was a sixth cousin, a Roosevelt, and the niece and goddaughter of the then incumbent president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt. As she was a Roosevelt, Eleanor was one of the very few people FDR’s mother could not claim wasn’t good enough for her son.

It was never an entirely real marriage. FDR, as he later did in politics, and ultimately in world affairs, created and managed a balance of power — a state of constant tension between his wife and his mother, which he could manipulate while continuing to enjoy social pleasures, including the company of more vivacious and prettier women than Eleanor, whom he encumbered with six children. (One died in infancy.) By 1939, Roosevelt was seeing a great deal of his cousin, Margaret Suckley (played in Roger Michell’s film by Laura Linney with her usual almost Streep-like virtuosity), and his secretary, Marguerite “Missy” Le Hand, was also constantly around. Both women were unmarried and there is room for, and has been since these times and before, speculation on how intimate these relationships became.

As it happens, I own most of the correspondence between Roosevelt and Suckley. There is only one place where there is a hint of physical contact. With Missy, the relations were so frequent and private — including months on end when they were almost alone on a houseboat Roosevelt used in Florida in the ’20s while he was convalescing from his illness — the possibilities of a physical relationship certainly cannot be ruled out, but this film pushes it with Missy emerging from FDR’s hilltop cottage in dead of night re-buttoning her blouse.

With Daisy, they would have had to be confined to their drives together on the Roosevelts’ thousand-acre estate, or at his winter home in Georgia, and to some of his trips in the president’s train — and even those would not have been easy to deal with discreetly. (It is also possible that FDR had a fling, as far as his ailment allowed it, with his first daughter-in-law, Betsy Cushing; the five Roosevelt children had a total of 19 marriages, and considered the relationship between their parents an example of what not to endure, matrimonially, for a lifetime.) Roosevelt’s medical records survive and there is no doubt that he retained his sexual powers after the onset of polio in 1921, though the impact of inactive legs might have been inhibiting even to such a confident man.

Where the film errs is in mentioning his relationship with Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd as if it were active in 1939. Lucy had been Eleanor’s social secretary when FDR was assistant secretary of the U.S. Navy in the First World War; there was certainly a full affair, and it was discovered by Eleanor. He was cranking up to run for vice-president, and Sara said she would disinherit him while Eleanor divorced him if the relationship continued, a double blow that would have nipped his political career in the bud.

Roosevelt did revive the relationship after his mother and Mr. Rutherfurd had died, in 1941, but it had been dormant apart from the telephone (Lucy identified herself to the White House switchboard as “Mrs. Paul Johnson”) for 20 years in 1939. (Daisy and Lucy were both with him when he died in Georgia in 1945.)

The film is also pretty explicit in implying that Eleanor was a lesbian. There is no evidence of this whatsoever, and all that has been cited was a letter to one of her lady friends about the pleasure of kissing her dimpled cheek. It is more likely that she was simply asexual after, as she put it, “doing her (maternal) duty.” There are a few other inaccuracies. The king and queen came from Canada by rail to Washington and were met at Union Station by the Roosevelts with suitable formality.

They went on the presidential yacht to George Washington’s home at Mount Vernon, the first time a vessel flew the presidential and Royal standards. They came to Hyde Park after visiting New York’s World’s Fair. FDR had known the king’s father and brother and Eleanor, given the identity of her uncle, and having gone to school in London and Paris, was not bumptious or chippy with Royals, as this film suggests.

Roosevelt invited the king and queen to Washington and New York when he learned they were coming to Canada, because he knew war was imminent, that Britain and France would need American help, and that the Royals could improve Anglo-American relations. He considered the British prime ministers he had dealt with — Macdonald, Baldwin, and Chamberlain — to be hopeless appeasers of Hitler.

There is not the least possibility that the king imagined it a slight to be served hot dogs at a picnic, that Eleanor asked if she could call the queen Elizabeth, that Sara shouted at Franklin, or that the queen shouted at the king or told him to stop stuttering, all of which occur in this film. Crowds on both sides of the Hudson sang Auld Lang Syne as the Royal couple boarded their train at the little station at Hyde Park, and FDR called out, “Good luck to you. All the luck in the world.” Eleven weeks later, Britain was at war, but this had been the greatest success in royal diplomacy since King Edward VII’s visit to Paris in 1903.

The film is strongest in depicting the extent of Roosevelt’s disability and vulnerability to sinus attacks, and his loneliness for affectionate female company. Bill Murray is not as good an FDR as Ralph Bellamy in Sunrise at Campobello, but is better than most others there have been. Linney ‘s performance as Daisy is roughly comparable to the great Greer Garson’s as Eleanor in the same film. Sara (Elizabeth Wilson) and the king (Samuel West) are excellent; Eleanor (played by Olivia Williams) is also quite good, but Elizabeth (Olivia Colman) is insufficiently winsome and much less charming than the real person.

It is difficult for me to judge how absorbing Hyde Park on Hudson will be to those who are not aficionados of the era or personalities involved, but I enjoyed it.

cbletters@gmail.com. From the National Post.