Warm Springs -- The choices we have

[Guest guest]

This is a movie worth watching. It is the story of lin Delano Roosevelt,

from the time

that he contracted polio through his nominating Al for President at the

1928

Democratic convention. It focuses on his despair, his illness, and his attempts

to face

prejudice & conquer his disability. He never was able to walk again, but he did

become

President and was elected an unprecedented 4 times. He died in May, 1945.

There is no sugar coating illness and disability. And it is a normal human

reaction to

become depressed and angry about having one's life turned upside down. But at

that

point, each of us who have faced trauma in our lives has a choice -- we can

remain bitter

and depressed, or we can make the best of what we have. We can make a choice to

grow

spiritually and to use what we have learned to help others. This is the key to

a purposeful

life.

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Emmy Award®-winners Branagh (HBO Films' Conspiracy) and 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 lin 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, lin

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 ( 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

lin 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 for

president at the 1928 Democratic convention. Four years later, Roosevelt himself

would be

nominated, winning the first of four elected terms as president.