A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. A review.

It can be an awkward and confounding thing to encounter a grown man in whom there is no guile. I discovered this last night in a theatre while watching the great Tom Hanks’ portrayal of Fred Rogers in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. About midway through there is a scene where the character Lloyd Vogel, played expertly by Matthew Rhys, is interviewing Mister Rogers in his tiny apartment in New Your City. Vogel, a hard bitten investigative reporter for Esquire magazine, has been given the assignment of interviewing Rogers for an issue the magazine is doing on American icons. He is tasked with writing a 400 word summary of the famous children’s television personality, but is having a difficult time getting a handle on his subject. Every time he asks the man a question, Rogers finds a way to change the subject to Vogel himself. And now in Mister Rogers’ cramped New York City apartment, he finds himself having a conversation with Daniel the Striped Tiger puppet. It is all suddenly too much, the puppet’s questions hitting a raw nerve from his past, far too close to home, and Lloyd picks up his briefcase and storms out.

My sympathies were 100% with Lloyd Vogel. I remember thinking, Mister Rogers was such an odd duck, man...so strange. I would have probably stormed out too.

There were many such scenes in the film. Another strangely uncomfortable moment came in a Chinese restaurant where Mister Rogers asks Lloyd to do an exercise with him before they ate their lunch. “Let’s have a minute or two of complete silence while we think about all the people in our lives who have loved us into being,” he says. The camera pulls back from the table where we discover every customer at every table following his instructions. The silence continues for what seems like an eternity. Mister Rogers opens his eyes and stares at Lloyd, then slowly turns his twinkling eyes towards the camera and stares longingly into...our eyes. It is at once enchantingly sweet and moving...and slightly creepy all at once.

With our 21st century sensibilities, it’s hard to make sense of Fred Rogers. He just doesn’t seem entirely human. Can anyone be that calm, that comfortable in his own skin, that outwardly focused? Although the point is made many times in the film that Fred Rogers was not a perfect man, the viewer comes away with the feeling that if not, he was awfully close. 

But, the biggest impression that was made on me by this film is how odd he seemed. A man like Rogers should have had a towering ego. The fame that he earned should have dazzled him more. With a career as successful as his he should have picked up more self-promotion skills. What we find instead is a man who seemed drawn to broken people. People like Lloyd Vogel. We discover that Mister Rogers was the only one of the ten men and women who were to be the subjects of Esquire magazine’s hero piece who would agree to be interviewed by Vogel, all the others scared off by his epic cynicism and caustic writing style. Before the interview, we learn that Mister Rogers read every previous article that Vogel ever wrote to get a better idea of what kind of man he was. He detected correctly that Lloyd Vogel was carrying around a heavy burden of anger and resentment towards his estranged father, played perfectly by Chris Cooper. This tortured relationship serves as the basic plot driver of the film. We watch as, slowly but surely, Lloyd begins to open up to this strange man in the cardigan sweater.

Although Mister Rogers was a Presbyterian minister and a man of faith, there is nothing preachy about him. There are no sappy scenes of religious conversion or grand gestures of repentance. Instead, there’s just this graceful, nonjudgmental, grown man telling us the truth about ourselves in the sweetest way possible and looking like an alien from another world in the process. 

I’m sure there are plenty of men and women in the world who have the same qualities as Mister Rogers did. They live their lives away from the cameras, in anonymity, unnoticed and uncelebrated. But Mister Rogers was different in that his life was lived on stage for everyone to see. How many famous people familiar with the glare of fame turn out like Fred Rogers? Precious few. Therein lies the oddness, the disturbing optics of his goodness. The fact that such simple virtue makes us a bit uncomfortable is perhaps the saddest fact about life in America, 2019.