April 30th: Warm Springs with Kenneth Branagh and Cynthia Nixon on HBO.

[Sean Reynolds]

Emmy Award®-winners Kenneth Branagh (HBO Films' Conspiracy) and Cynthia Nixon (Sex and the City) star in the true but little-known story about the physical and spiritual evolution of the man who would become president.

Warm Springs follows Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Branagh), left a paraplegic from polio in 1921 at age 39, as he seeks out a "miracle" cure in the backwoods of rural Georgia. As his wife Eleanor (Nixon) takes up the mantle of the public Roosevelt, Franklin battles the stigma of polio and encounters those affected not just by disability, but by poverty, illiteracy and racism. In time he comes to learn that though he may never walk again, he can still lead. In Warm Springs, with help from a devoted therapist (Kathy Bates) and, eventually, his chief aide (David Paymer) and wife, a future four-term president finds his personal and political soul.

An inspiring true story of adversity faced and overcome, Warm Springs chronicles the trials, and ultimate triumphs, of a privileged, even cavalier man whose life veers unexpectedly off course, only to find that the detour becomes the source of his greatness. In 1921, before he had run for either governor of New York or president, 39-year-old Franklin D. Roosevelt faced a future of unlimited success. But that same year he contracted polio, and was left paralyzed from the waist down. At the time there was no known cause of, or cure for, polio, and the practice of the day was to hide anyone with the disability away from the public eye. Many believed that if a person contracted polio, it was due to a moral failing - and God was punishing them. And it was also widely (and mistakenly) believed that polio affected the mind.

Warm Springs follows Roosevelt's story from the heady times before he contracted polio (the fifth cousin of Theodore Roosevelt, FDR was the Democratic VP candidate in 1920) through the initial phases of his affliction, subsequent despair, and eventual rebirth. Roosevelt found hope after hearing about a young polio victim who learned to walk again after swimming in the waters of a health spa near Atlanta. He moved to Warm Springs in 1924, and his initial cynicism about the run-down conditions and pitiable patients was gradually replaced by empathy, optimism and inspiration. Eventually, he decided to buy the inn, with visions of turning it into the world's first polio-treatment center. He also found the will to head back to public life, triumphantly returning to nominate Al Smith for president at the 1928 Democratic convention. Four years later, Roosevelt himself would be nominated, winning the first of four elected terms as president.

http://www.hbo.com/films/warmsprings

Looks REALLLLLY good!

[MADem]

1. Interesting casting choices n/t