When the first trailers for A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood hit, it was easy to imagine the tear-pulling weepy biopic that a studio would crank out in the hopes of cashing in on the multi-generational adoration that remains for Mr. Rogers and his surrounding iconography and immortal message of kindness and love. And with beloved American icon Tom Hanks signed up to embody beloved American icon Fred Rogers, again, the easy choices were all laid out and ready to be made.
It is a credit then to screenwriters Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster and director Marielle Heller that they avoided the easy choice at every turn. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, now available on home media and VOD, is not a biopic but rather a kind of semi-fictional essay on the life and message of Fred Rogers, and it is proudly and profoundly weird in the way it utilizes and plays with the casual surrealness of Rogers’ familiar TV show.
The first time you see Hanks step onto that set, in that costume, with his grey hair and his natural ebullience slowed way down the better to match Rogers’ deliberate cadence and tempo, it’s deeply strange. There is never a moment where you aren’t cognizant of the fact that you are watching Tom Hanks imitate Mr. Rogers, but (like with Hanks’ turn as Walt Disney in Saving Mr. Banks) the gravity of Hanks’ place in American culture is such that the film is better equipped to confer the importance of the man he portrays. No doubt Heller could have found someone who could more easily disappear into the physicality of Mr. Rogers, but there’s no other actor alive who could exert the kind of immediate affection that Hanks does. You have to believe that this is a guy whose sheer presence bends reality because of the built-up love and affection of an entire nation, and with Hanks the film and role have an immediate legitimacy.
But while Hanks as Rogers is all over Neighborhood, and is no doubt the reason you saw/will see this movie, this isn’t his story. The true star of the film is Matthew Rhys as Lloyd Vogel, an Esquire writer who has gained a reputation for his lacerating profiles. Lloyd sees no problem with his cynical outlook on the world, but it is clear to his family and co-workers, especially wife Andrea (Susan Kelechi Watson), that the anger Lloyd brings to the world every day is killing him. And it’s certainly killing his career, as fewer and fewer subjects are offering themselves up to be subjected to Lloyd’s poison pen.
Perhaps that’s why his editor (Christine Lahti) assigns him a 400-word puff piece on Mr. Rogers for a larger article about heroes, noting as she does so that Rogers was the only person willing to sit down with him. Lloyd can’t help but immediately start looking for falsehoods and cracks in Rogers’ public image, which of course gets the hackles up on everyone he talks to. “Lloyd,” Andrea warns him sternly, “don’t ruin my childhood.”
Here’s the first stumbling block an audience might have with this film: Lloyd is an asshole. And not in the amusing or cool or lovable way like we expect from movies. It’s a strikingly accurate portrayal of a man who is an interesting character in a movie but who would be genuinely unpleasant to be around. Rhys, so terrific on The Americans, brings a striking coldness to the scenes where Lloyd is at room temperature, and a genuinely off-putting jittery edge to the moments where Lloyd’s reserve breaks.
(Sidenote: Heller worked similar magic with Melissa McCarthy in Can You Ever Forgive Me?, another movie that did a remarkable job of bringing you into the world and life of a character, McCarthy’s Lee Israel who was not ‘movie mean’ but truly anti-social and misanthropic. There’s a phenomenal scene late in that one where McCarthy begs an old girlfriend to take her back and is shut down quickly and coldly. With Heller behind the camera, you come away from the scene both pitying and empathizing with the lonely Israel while also completely understanding why the ex-girlfriend wisely stayed the hell away from that particular dumpster fire of a situation.)
Lloyd comes by his bleak worldview honestly, with much of his understanding of love and familial bonds being shaped by his volatile relationship with his father Jerry (Chris Cooper, who between this and Little Women had himself a goddamn spectacular 2019). It’s that festering wound that Rogers zeroes in on and seeks to address, the TV host’s unassuming inquisitiveness leaving the jaded reporter vulnerable for the first time in his adult life.
Neighborhood is built around the subsequent conversations the two men share, as Rogers lives his life as, you know, Mr. Rogers and Jerry, with increasing desperation, searches for the ‘real’ Fred Rogers. Some of these sequences play the divide between the two men as so exacerbated that I have to assume Heller intends for us to laugh, at least in disbelief at Jerry’s hostility and Rogers’ endless reserves of patience and humility (after Jerry tries to bait Rogers by bringing up his at-time fraught relationship with his sons, Rogers thanks him for helping him see things from their point-of-view).
But even as the film is filling you in on the historical importance of Fred Rogers and the place he occupies in culture (with Hanks spliced into archival footage of everything from a guest spot on The Arsenio Hall Show to the famous Congressional testimony where Mr. Rogers saved PBS’s funding during the Vietnam War), the priority remains Jerry’s crumbling emotional shields and expanding heart.
Heller frames her film as an episode of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, with Hanks addressing the audience as narrative bookends, and using miniatures and puppets a la the Kingdom of Make-Believe for scene transitions and establishing shots. It has a discombobulating effect at first, especially contrasted with the rest of Heller’s, aesthetic which favors natural lightning and gritty textures.
But this approach, while undeniably off-putting at times, works to make this one, intimate story fit into the larger discussion of Mr. Rogers’ legacy and impact. By holding up one example of how the way he lived and the kind of life he demonstrated impacted and healed a person, Neighborhood serves as a referendum on the power of kindness and forgiveness in all our lives.
Jerry derisively refers to Mr. Rogers as a living saint at various points in the film, a notion which he is disabused of by everyone from Rogers’ longtime producer Bill Isler (a wonderfully, warmly grumpy Enrico Colantoni) to wife Joanne (Maryann Plunkett). Fred, they repeatedly remind Jerry, is human too. He does possess a temper, and he can be stubborn and unreasonable (a magic touch of Heller’s approach is she allows you the room to see why it would be kind of a pain-in-the-ass to try and make a TV show with a guy who is constantly halting production to have long, involved conversations with literally anyone). It takes work for Fred Rogers to be Mr. Rogers, and accepting the responsibility and weight of that work is what sets Jerry on the path to healing.
Maybe acknowledging that there was human frailty underneath Mr. Rogers’ eternally sunny on-screen persona only serves to make him seem even more saintly, like how Brian of Nazareth insisting he wasn’t the Messiah only made the hordes all the more convinced that he was.
But Heller prefers to wrestle with the pricklier aspects hiding beneath the rose bush, and approaching this material in this way allows the film to achieve greater emotional heights than if it was playing the familiar notes of the hagiography or the Oscar-bait. The emotional climax of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood isn’t a Kleenex-riddled speech, but rather a half-muttered admission of love. Speaking these truths softly makes them hit all the harder, a lesson Mr. Rogers imparted over the course of decades and which these filmmakers have clearly taken to heart.
Daring and strange and not at all what I think any of us expected when we heard about it, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is one of last year’s best offerings and you would do well to own it.