Review: A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019)
Marielle Heller’s A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is more rousing as a moral call-to-action than a movie. That’s not to say it’s not a good movie. It is. But it’s not really a biopic about Fred Rogers, nor a definitive statement on his legacy as a children’s show host and moral evangelist. Instead it’s a moral lesson like the kind Rogers would make on his program. It wants to make you a better person for viewing it.
The film follows a jaded magazine journalist, Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys), who’s given the assignment of interviewing Fred Rogers (Tom Hanks) for a puff piece about heroes. He’s skeptical about Rogers’ reputation as a living saint, but the more he digs into the man and talks to him, the more Lloyd finds himself troubled by his own emotional problems—his fear, his bitterness, and most notably his anger at his deadbeat father (Chris Cooper)—and compelled to heal some wounds. It’s no surprise to say that in the end Mr. Rogers teaches him to be a better person, much as he taught the children who viewed his PBS program everyday. The whole film plays like an episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood pitched to adult moviegoers. It’s a moral lesson, and as a moral lesson it’s exceptional. As a drama, it’s simply adequate.
Like she did last year with Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Heller has made a period drama about a difficult individual (in this case, Lloyd Vogel) who grows some small measure over the course of the film. She has again cast talented performers who do a lot with the conventions of the script and the familiar emotional arc of the story. Her visual style is also clean and textured. There’s nothing particularly showy in how she stages the conversations between characters. She does a lot to embed us in the late-nineties through the costuming and establishing shots and pop-culture references without calling attention to all the period details. She’s subtle in her approach to setting and exposition, which is appreciated, since other aspects of the film are not subtle at all.
Heller’s biggest gambit is to framing the whole film as an episode of Fred Rogers’ television show. The film begins with the famous opening of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, filmed in the same grainy standard-definition video format as the original show. Hanks sings the famous song and puts on his sweater and changes his shoes and then introduces the themes of the film with a picture board that displays the face of our central character, Lloyd Vogel. Fred Rogers describes him as a sad man who’s hurting, and then encourages us, the audience, to join him in learning about this man so that they can perhaps help him with his hurt.
Heller often goes back to this conceit throughout the film, most notably during transitions, when she depicts New York City, Pittsburgh, and other locations using model replicas like those of the neighbourhood on Fred Rogers’ show. At first, the stylistic approach is merely cute: a paean to the viewer’s presumed affection for the children’s show. But as she continues to use this approach, her tactic grows clearer: she is blurring the lines between Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and the real world, just as Fred Rogers’ did on his show. The whole point of the show was to teach children how to deal with their real emotions in the real world; whether they were working out these emotions with Daniel Tiger or their parents back at home was unimportant. The emotions were what mattered. The same point is true in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood: Lloyd’s emotions, whether dealt with while talking to a puppet on the set of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood or to his wife, Andrea (Susan Kelechi Watson), in his New York apartment, are real and need dealing with.
Lloyd’s problems are unexceptional: his father skipped out on him and his sister when they were children and his mother was dying of cancer, creating trust issues and a profound anger that still consumes him as an adult. They’re the kinds of problems that many people share. They’re mundane and surmountable. But they are also real, and they matter to Lloyd, just as they’d matter to us if we were suffering from them. And they matter to Fred Rogers. He approached every person he met as the most important person in the world to him in that moment, and it’s only through the extension of that kind of love and grace that people can grow. Hanks is especially good at conveying this element of Fred Rogers in his performance here. He doesn’t look or sound much like the real Fred Rogers, but he does slow down the pace of the scenes he’s in, use a deliberate cadence when speaking, and zero in on his screen partners with his kind eyes, giving them undivided attention. It captures the mindful presence of Fred Rogers without being pure mimicry.
The exercise of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is to make us care about Lloyd’s personal emotional problems, and by extension, our own, and to approach them much as Fred Rogers does: with love and grace. It’s more successful at inviting us to approach our lives with love and grace than it is at making us care about Lloyd Vogel. Lloyd’s story is unexceptional, and by virtue of being unexceptional, it’s not particularly riveting. We’ve seen this sort of character arc before, in much the same style. But it does cause you to reflect on yourself and your own problems through its runtime. It gives you the space to make the connections between Mister Rogers’ lessons and your own life.
In one scene, Lloyd and Fred go for lunch at a Chinese restaurant and Fred encourages Lloyd to take a minute and think about all the people in his life who contributed to him becoming the person he is today. As if overhearing him, the other people in the restaurant fall silent as well and follow Fred’s instructions. Heller glides the camera over the stillness of the room and then cuts to Fred’s face in close up, as he turns towards the camera and looks straight in the lens, silently inviting us to reflect on our lives as well.
As I said, it’s not a subtle approach, but Fred Rogers was never subtle, nor should have been (he was making a children’s show, after all). And it’s hard to resist such an earnest plea for self-reflection. That A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood encourages us to become better people after watching it is undeniable. But if I need a reminder about the lessons of Mister Rogers now having seen A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, I’m much more likely to pick up my Bible or watch an old episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood online than revisit Heller’s film. Lloyd’s is not the type of story that warrants revisiting, so I might as well go straight to the source that inspires it.
7 out of 10
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019, USA)
Directed by Marielle Heller; written by Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster, based on “Can You Say... Hero?” by Tom Junod; starring Tom Hanks, Matthew Rhys, Susan Kelechi Watson, Chris Cooper.