Credit: Sony Pictures
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019)
There are two schools of thought on Mister Rogers. One sees him as a benign role model—and not just for children. The other pegs him as an insipid fool, a pied-piper of feel-good nostrums.
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood embodies the two schools with a protagonist, Fred Rogers himself (Tom Hanks), and an antagonist, the cynical journalist Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys) who resents his assignment from Esquire to interview the TV host.
The gap between the two men has less to do with their professed values than in the way they act on them. At an awards ceremony for journalism, Vogel describes his profession thus: ‘We get to fix a broken world with words.” He is a humanist in abstract who doesn’t like humanity. Mister Rogers, on the other hand, tried to fix the world one piece—one person—at a time. Instead of talking about humanity, Rogers actually liked people and tried to engage each one on his or her level.
Rhys gets the easy role. Vogel is full of himself, his workaholism a barrier against self-knowledge. He’s bitter about his old man (Chris Cooper) and won’t let go of his anger. He’s a damaged piece of the world. Describing his encounter with Rogers, Vogel tells his wife Andrea (Susan Kelechi Watson) with an ironic edge, “He’s just about the nicest person I’ve ever met.”
Hanks has the hard part. He fully inhabits the cardigan-wearing figure familiar to millions who grew up with him—or grew up with the parodies that proliferated after a while. Mister Rogers is easy to parody but Hanks dials it right. He gets that pinched but authentic smile, that awkward yet assured body language, that peculiar emotional essence. Mister Rogers is like the kindly dentist who assures you it won’t hurt and even when it does, the memory is less about pain than his warm, chair-side manner.
In the course of the conversations at the heart of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, the film explores the subversive mission of Fred Rogers. Aware that American television existed largely to sell things, with kids shows mining an emerging market, Rogers used the medium instead as a way of giving children vivid examples of how to live. Although Rogers was an ordained Presbyterian minister, there were no churches in his neighborhood, just individuals who were sometimes afraid, angry, vulnerable or hurt. With Christ as his unstated role model, Rogers gave lessons in selfless love leading to compassion, empathy and acceptance—a message many self-professed Christians have disavowed.
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is inspired by Tom Junod’s 1998 Esquire profile, “Can You Say… Hero?” The material is interpreted imaginatively by director Marielle Heller (Can You Ever Forgive Me?) and screenwriters Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster. Mister Rogers Crayola-colored neighborhood bleeds into the empty bustle of Vogel’s ostensibly real world. Suddenly buildings are models, the cars roll out of matchboxes and the moon hangs on a string from the painted sky.
The screenplay also touches minor keys in Rogers’ happy melody. Vogel receives no answer when he asks about the “burden” of being Mister Rogers. Asked about his own children, Rogers concedes that it wasn’t Easy Street. And yet, Rogers comes across as deeply perceptive. His will for empathy allows him to see past the facades Vogel erects. Anyone, in fact, could see through Vogel but most people are too preoccupied to look closely at anyone—even themselves.
