“Mustard or ketchup, your highness?”

In June of 1939, as Hitler was gearing up to invade Poland and start World War II, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth traveled to New York to eat hot dogs on a picnic with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his various mistresses.

The fact that everything in the above sentence is entirely true does wonders for the film that features it all, Roger Michell’s subtle and silly Hyde Park on Hudson. At first glance, the movie might seem to denigrate the great FDR, with his drinking and mistresses and all his personality quirks, but Michell’s splendid little period piece does quite the opposite — it looks on FDR with great admiration and respect.

Roosevelt is played here by the American treasure Bill Murray, though the movie is not told from his perspective. It is viewed through the eyes of Roosevelt’s distant cousin, Daisy (Laura Linney), who was having an affair with the president whenever he visited Hyde Park, New York, his hometown on the Hudson River. Roosevelt would visit a grand estate owned by his mother, a controlling little woman portrayed here the way Norman Bates might portray his mother. “Mother doesn’t like me drinking,” the president will say after sipping from a flask and hiding it in his desk, like a child with a forbidden piece of candy.

Early scenes in the film show Daisy and FDR riding through the picturesque countryside, tailed by a sheriff’s deputy for protection, as the two begin to explore their emotions for each other. How strange it must have been when Roosevelt held Daisy’s hand. Stranger still when Daisy leaned into his advances. Up until that point they had only been distant relatives. “What about Eleanor?” Daisy would ask. “Oh, she’s into she-men furniture builders,” the president would say referring to his wife’s rumored bisexuality.

As the inevitable war in Europe grinded closer, British royals had come to New York to feel out the president and his willingness to help fight the Nazis. King George VI, the same stuttering and stammering monarch from The King’s Speech, and his wife descended onto Hyde Park a little confused about their visit and why it was being held outside of Washington, D.C. A hilarious sequence takes place in the New York countryside, where the king decides he wants to greet some commoners, though no one seems to recognize him or care. One farmer barely musters a glance at the king while he plows his field — “He’s busy,” the king says with a huff after his waves go unanswered.

Murray is wonderful as the paralyzed president, but its Roosevelt’s interactions with the royals — played here by Samuel West and Olivia Colman — that make Hyde Park on Hudson so charming. Roosevelt treated them as his equals, not the nobility that they were, and it frazzled them to such a degree that they were dumbfounded. When it came time for the picnic, King George is utterly baffled at the notion of hot dogs. He even says “hot dogs” with this sour expression on his face, as if it were watery gruel from a Russian gulag. The president promises the king that the hot dogs have no hidden meaning, but ask yourself what the American people would have thought had the king refused the most American of foods.

The parts that interested me least were all the relationship drama between FDR, a manipulative and cruel Eleanor, and Daisy and the other women. It does sporadically work when Roosevelt enlists Daisy to spy on the royals — “All quiet on the upstairs front,” she tells him — or when Daisy must attend the hot dog picnic in the film’s closing scenes.

The best scenes, though, are when FDR is sticking it to the king, who is grown very accustomed to having his royal behind kissed.