Movie Reaction: A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

The Pitch: The End of the Tour + Won't You Be My Neighbor

In my mind, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (Beautiful Day, from now on) and last year's Mr. Rogers documentary Won't You Be My Neighbor are inextricably linked. If you watch one without seeing the other, then you are doing yourself a disservice. The way I see it, Won't You Be My Neighbor presents a thesis and Beautiful Day tests that thesis.

Won't You Be My Neighbor is a documentary I liked very much, although I admit that it barely stopped short of being a hagiography. Fred Rogers is the most genuinely nice person to ever be famous. I'm sure some of this was PR, but there's been over half a century (including nearly 20 years since his death) for anything bad to come out about him. It's not like he has a powerful estate, capable of holding things back. If there were skeletons in that closet, someone would've found them by now. That's what Won't You Be My Neighbor presents: Fred Rogers was the real deal. The soft-spokenness. The genuine interest in virtually everyone he met. His simple set of beliefs. It's all real.

Beautiful Day then poses the question "Can Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood exist in the real world?". The movie literally starts as an episode of Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood in which Mr. Rogers (Tom Hanks) introduces the story of the movie. That story is of Esquire reporter Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys), who gets an assignment to write a "puff piece" about Fred Rogers for a hero issue of the magazine. Vogel is the kind of reporter who takes his job seriously, has received great acclaim for his work, but has also burned everyone he writes about so consistently, that Fred Rogers is the only person even willing to be interviewed by him. Vogel also has some unresolved issues with his father which is getting in the way of his ability to connect with his wife (This Is Us' Susan Kelechi Watson) and newborn son. Vogel goes to meet Fred Rogers in Pittsburgh and is immediately suspicious of him, as all cynical people are. Look, the movie is based on an Esquire article calls "Can You Say...Hero?" so you know what direction the movie goes in from there.

Like any good experiment though, the point isn't to go in some unexpected direction. It's to prove the thesis, and that's exactly what Beautiful Day does. It presents Fred Rogers as a real and complicated but exceptional person. Most of the work falls on Tom Hanks, who is more than up to the challenge. Because, the movie doesn't oversell the humanizing moments. Fred Rogers never unloads on an employee or complains about a stranger coming up to him on the street. Instead, Hanks makes Fred Rogers real with pauses and the way he says things. His take on Fred Rogers is a man who works intensely hard to channel his anger and frustration in productive ways. Perhaps a 30-year-old Fred Rogers would need a scene in which he stares dead-eyed at a wall by himself, struggling to contain dark thoughts. However, Beautiful Day's Fred Rogers is older and more comfortable. He has people working for him who are protective of him. Most importantly, he's regimented and knows what he needs to do to be the man he wants to be. It's pretty marvelous work by Tom Hanks. I worry that people will once again take it for granted how good he is, just because the casting choice of "America's Dad" to play Mister Rogers is so obvious.

Rogers is just a supporting character though. Vogel is the protagonist of the movie. Matthew Rhys is good in the role. I like that the movie doesn't try to turn Vogel into a true believer of Fred Rogers by the end. Rather, he seems to come to the conclusion that some people don't need to be torn down. It's a little strange to see Chris Cooper as Vogel's estranged father. I'm so used to Cooper in either sage or stern roles. "Hard-drinking, roguish father" took some getting used to. Susan Kelechi Watson is good, although I wish there was a little more going on with her character. She's not a nagging wife, but her role often comes down to asking Lloyd if he's ready to emotionally invest in their family unit.

As I mentioned, the movie is structured a bit like an episode of Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. Director Marielle Heller wisely doesn't overdo it. She includes the classic intro and closing. It cuts back to Mr. Rogers hosting only once or twice in the middle. It occasionally presents things like a segment in the show, such as a brief summary of how a magazine gets made. The big stylistic flourish though is that instead of establishing shots of cities or locations from stock footage, they use a giant model of Pittsburgh and New York City in the style of the model neighborhood Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. Describing it sounds too cute by half, but in the movie it really work. That, mixed with music inspired by the Mr. Rogers' show give the movie a very gentle feel all-around.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood has some of the same limitations as other movies of its ilk (The End of the Tour is the immediate example that comes to mind). The character it's most interested in is one that it keeps at an arm's length. It never fully moves past the legend of Mister Rogers. To its credit, it doesn't feel like a case where his widow was shooting down more controversial takes. It maybe tries a little too hard to find a deeper meaning to the whole experience that Lloyd Vogel goes through. Mostly though, this is a sweet movie that does an excellent job evoking a specific feeling. I'm not sure where I land on the "Is Mr. Rogers a hero?" debate (if there is one), but I do believe he was a genuinely decent man. We need more stories about genuinely decent people.

Verdict: Strongly Recommend