I’m “biast” (con): nothing
I have read the source material (and I love it)
(what is this about? see my critic’s minifesto)
I started sobbing from the opening moments of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, and I didn’t stop crying for two hours. And then after I left the cinema and ran into a fellow film critic who had also just seen it, I literally could not manage a word of discussion without bursting into tears again.
This film wrecked me. Utterly wrecked me. In the best possible way. I saw myself in it. It was speaking to me in that same way that Mister Rogers always magically seemed to be doing from out of the TV when I was little kid. And I really needed its message. The whole world does right now.
I did not imagine this movie would affect me like it did. Even last year’s wonderful Fred Rogers documentary, Won’t You Be My Neighbor (which I will review asap) did not hit me like this.
I grew up with Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. I was born in 1969, and I was one of that generation of kids that people feared were going to be destroyed by television (and maybe we were?), which Fred Rogers was hoping to forestall with his show. I do remember his gentle soothing that it was okay to be angry sometimes, and here’s how to deal with that, and his reassurances that I was okay just as I was (though I don’t know how much that took), and the odd fantasies of his puppets and the weird king and the trolley between reality and make-believe, and so on.
I think the idea that a world of wild imagination was just an easy mass-transit journey away might be a thing I kept. But not much else of his show stuck with me — or so I thought — in the way as that other OMG-save-the-children! kiddie show that debuted around the same time, Sesame Street. I continued to revisit Street well into my teens and 20s, cuz it was snarky and meta and funny, even once I was well beyond kindergarten. But I’m pretty sure I never watched Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood once I started going to school at age five.
And still, from the moment Tom Hanks (Toy Story 4, The Post) ambled into Mister Rogers’s little house and changed out of his jacket for a cardigan, and out of his shoes for sneakers (this is how every episode opened, in case you don’t know that), and settled in to introduce a tale about his friend Lloyd, I descended to blubbering. Maybe it’s not a matter of “still,” as if there was some contradiction in what I brought to the movie versus what it gave to me, but precisely the opposite: Perhaps Neighborhood instantly slammed me back into the vulnerability of being a very small, very uncertain, very scared child, and then instantly reassured me that everything I was feeling, all the turmoil and confusion, was, in fact, absolutely okay. Just like Lloyd!
This is the beauty and the genius of Marielle Heller’s (The Diary of a Teenage Girl) not-a-biopic movie about Fred Rogers. This isn’t a movie about him as a person — or, at least, it’s that only tangentially. This is a story that is profoundly about the impact he had on all of us who watched him on TV, and on the world at large, via his impact offscreen on one adult person. Heller — and screenwriters Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster (who as a team helped write Maleficent: Mistress of Evil) — frame the entire movie as an episode of Neighborhood, with gentle lessons that will be imparted, pitched not to children but to us adults today. This isn’t just a movie that is uncynical: it directly confronts cynicism and misanthropy and anger and resentment and all the other heavy unpleasant emotions that weigh down so many of us, and asks us to let them go if we can, or at least to acknowledge the damage they might be doing us.
In 1998, New York journalist Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys: Burnt, Beau Brummell: This Charming Man), a nasty-ass writer with a rep for meanness, is assigned — as a joke but for real, too — by his editor (Christine Lahti) at Esquire to write a quickie 400-word blurb about Fred Rogers for an upcoming issue on American heroes. Vogel goes to visit Rogers (Hanks, because, seriously, who else?) in his Pittsburgh studio for an interview. To say that Vogel is skeptical is an understatement: he keeps waiting for the “real” Rogers to emerge, the man behind the TV illusion, who surely cannot be as good and as pure and as noble as he seems. But there is no distinction between the performance and the man — the Mister Rogers of TV is not a character. Fred Rogers is a man who is precisely what he presents himself to be. Almost unnervingly, almost unbelievably, although yet also immensely plausibly, too.
It’s all a beautiful wonder. And it takes some time, but Rogers becomes a friend to Lloyd and has an intense impact on Lloyd. Those of us watching may not be as “broken” — Lloyd’s word — as Lloyd is, but his brokenness is very much a reflection of the world today: this mistrust in authority figures, the exhaustion with the bullshit. It’s tough to accept that anyone — particularly anyone with a public persona — could be so authentic, so honest, so nice.
And this is 20 years ago! (We are so much more hardened and more angry and more unkind than we were then.) Neighborhood is inspired by Tom Junod’s 1998 Esquire article — yes, about heroes; he ended up writing not 400 but 10,000 utterly un-world-weary words. Junod’s personal stuff has been fictionalized, but the Rogers stuff in the movie is completely recognizable from the Esquire essay (you can read it online). Junod has now written a brand-new piece for The Atlantic about the legacy of his friendship with Rogers, in which he suggests that “just about everything [Rogers] stood for has been lost.” I hope that’s not true… and if it’s not, this could be a movie that reminds us how to re-energize it. This is a movie about kindness, yes, and gentleness, yes, but also about intentionality — it’s about being kind and gentle not by thoughtless default but with deliberate aforethought, to counter the hate and anger and the pain and the despair of the world. To fight it. And to be kind to ourselves, which feels like a thing that gets more difficult all the time.
I think I forgot these lessons from the Mister Rogers of my childhood. But I welcome the reminder. And now I am trying to figure out how to make that happen, and make it happen with the spirit of a child who doesn’t know that isn’t impossible. Maybe I feel a bit scolded by this movie, that I have lost a certain spirit. Maybe we all need this scolding.
viewed during the 63rd BFI London Film Festival
Was not someone who watched the show while growing up but am definitely old enough to now need a reminder that goodness and decency are not abstract concepts. Thanks for the lovely review; I’ll be at the theatre to see it soon.
In your fourth paragraph: “(any maybe we were?),”
What a terrific review! I’m glad it helped you! Last year’s documentary shook me up the way this year’s film shook you up (I watched it four times in the theater). The power of Fred Rogers lives on.
Fixed my typo. Thanks for pointing it out.
Effect is usually a noun. Affect is usually a verb. But you already know this so I assume you had something else on your mind when writing that because you’re usually much better at proofreading.
No, it was just a typo, which I’ve fixed.
Sometimes a typo is just a cigar.
Sometimes a typo is a homonym spelled correctly that spellcheck doesn’t flag up as wrong in this usage. (Software is still dumb. I kinda can’t wait for genuine AI as long as it doesn’t want to kill us.)
I’d love for someone to invent and mass-produce C-3PO in real life, and you can buy a unit to just stand around while you work, and his only job is to tap people on the shoulder and nervously and politely make corrections and writing suggestions.
I’m sure I’ve said it before, but I’m convinced that spellcheck is an early version of Skynet that’s trying to drive us slowly mad, through nonsensical corrections, so we won’t put up much resistance when it tries to take over the planet.
Does the movie mention that he was a vegetarian?
Yes.
I agree with most of your review. The film has a very good message and even allowed me to get in touch with my damaged relationship with my own father. Unfortunately, for me, Vogel was such an unsympathetic character that I was not as emotionally involved as perhaps I should have been.
Don’t you think Vogel needed to be “unsympathetic” for the movie to make the points that it was making? A nice guy wouldn’t have needed to change.
Loved it, even though I didn’t grow up on the show and only know Mr. Rogers from articles and video clips. (I need to watch the documentary soon.)
Three of my favorite moments (spoilers):
– When the film literally takes a minute of silence for Vogel to contemplate all those who “loved him into being.” And Hanks breaks the fourth wall and looks directly at the camera, steadily, kindly, asking us to do the same.
– The very ending, with Rogers sitting at the piano after the set closes down. There’s a moment when he pounds on the lower keys, calling back to an earlier point in the film where he tells Vogel about good ways to release anger, including pounding on a piano. It’s a brief but powerful demonstration that Rogers was human too, struggling with human things (and taking his own advice). And that wrestling with your emotions is a messy process that goes on after the end credits play and the bright lights go out.
– “If it’s human, it’s mentionable. If it’s mentionable, it’s manageable.”
For someone who did not grow up in the US and had never heard of this show until now, will the film have less impact on me? I realise the themes it deals with are universal and applicable regardless of that circumstance, but I wanted to know how important it is (if at all) to be famiiar or have grown up watching the show. This also makes me wonder if the film will be less successful outside of the US because of that.
You could watch the documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor—which is terrific—first (or, in my case, instead, because I find Tom Hanks nearly unbearable).
I think that, inevitably, someone who watched and loved the show will be impacted differently. But it’s not necessary to be familiar with the show to appreciate the movie; I personally didn’t grow up with the show, but I still loved the film. The film in fact takes the perspective of a character who ISN’T overly familiar with the show and is even skeptical/cynical about it, so the beauty of the show and the humanity of Fred Rogers is revealed to him (and thus to the audience).
You can also easily find a lot of Fred Rogers videos on YouTube if you want a quick introduction. I highly recommend this one, which combines a clip from the show where he speaks to a child in a wheelchair, with a later clip where he’s being inducted into the TV Hall of Fame. I think it beautifully captures the kindness of the show and of the man himself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3vp-EXQ5Rs
I read something somewhere recently — wish I could remember where, but I think it was a major outlet — by a woman who talked about how her Gen Z kids have gotten totally enthralled by old episodes of *Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood* on YouTube. They find him comforting, apparently. I’ve been meaning to go back and watch some of them and see if they help me…
I googled “my kids love mr rogers” and I think this is it:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2019/11/27/what-happened-when-i-showed-vintage-mister-rogers-my-st-century-kids/
Yup, that was it.
Difficult to say, of course, but I can tell you that I saw this at London Film Festival, and when I spoke to lots of my fellow British critics afterward, people who had not grown up with the show and hadn’t even necessarily heard of Rogers, they were also deeply moved.
Just putting this link here. Look at these beautiful pictures.
https://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2020/02/08/803320785/the-man-behind-mister-rogers-away-from-the-neighborhood-of-make-believe
“The heart was made for love.”