HANKS FOR THE MEMORIES
America’s most beloved actor plays America’s best-loved children’s TV presenter. It should be twee, yet it’s sweetly irresistible
ACouPLE of years ago, a documentary called Won’t You Be My Neighbor? told the story of children’s TV presenter Fred Rogers, a household name in the u .S. as the host of a long- running show called Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.
It ran from 1968 until 2001, and had the same kind of influence on generations of American children as Blue Peter did here.
More so, really, because Rogers, an ordained minister who died in 2003, used songs and simple puppetry to offer his young viewers moral and philosophical guidance.
Shows such as Sesame Street also played a powerful role in educating kids. But they were loud, frenzied, madcap. In contrast, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was calm, gentle, understated — its tone set by the comfy cardigan into which its host ritually changed, after removing his blazer , at the start of the episode.
The documentary sank without trace on this side of the Atlantic, where Rogers is unknown. That was a shame, because it included a mesmerising clip from a 1969 u .S. Senate sub-committee hearing (I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but bear with me) at which Rogers testified in favour of $20 million worth of funding for America ’s fledgling public television service.
The sub -committee’s unyielding chairman, Senator John P astore, was entirely hostile to the idea until Rogers demonstrated the value of his show by reciting the words of one of his songs, designed to teach children patience and restraint. P astore’s brittle resistance promptly crumbled like a cookie. You can find the exchange on YouTube. It is delightful.
A Beautiful Day In The Neighbor - hood doesn’t tell that story; it ’s set nearly three decades later in 1998. But director Marielle Heller and writers Noah Harpster and Micah Fitzerman-Blue have doubtless used it to inform their semi-fictionalised account of the relationship between the beatific Rogers and an abrasive reporter assigned to profile him for Esquire magazine.
In the end, the journalist’s cynicism, like Pastore’s before him, is no match for Rogers’ benevolence, which seems soft and malleable but has a core of steel.
THE casting is no less cherishable for being entirely obvious. Tom Hanks plays Rogers — America ’s most beloved actor playing its most beloved children’s TV presenter.
He does so charmingly , and by all accounts with terrific accuracy , nailing the deliberate way Rogers enunciated his words. Kindness and decency radiate from him. Indeed, he seems too good to be true.
A British audience, all too familiar with shattering revelations about childhood TV idols, might wonder whether he is.
After all, Heller’s last film, 2018’s excellent Can You Ever Forgive Me?, was all about fakery . Yet Rogers’ virtues are real, not feigned.
Hanks has an Academy A ward nomination to show for his performance — but as Best Supporting Actor. The lead here is Matthew Rhys, playing hard-hitting investigative reporter Lloyd V ogel, who resents his brief to write about a secular saint. V ogel is a chippy , unlikeable man, estranged from his even less likeable father Jerry (Chris Cooper). At a family wedding , they get into a fight. V ogel ends up with facial injuries, which Rogers asks him about, and he is duly saddened by what he hears.
He begins to include Vogel and his family in his prayers — the last place Vogel wants to be — and becomes more therapist than profile subject, as the narrative continues to follow an entirely predictable course towards father-son reconciliation.
That’s hardly a spoiler. It has been flagged from the film ’ s opening
moments, when Rogers explains that forgiving those you love is the hardest forgiveness of all.
In less assured hands than Heller’s, all this could be twee beyond endurance. And hats off to her for daring to render every grown-up bus and plane journey in pre- school model form — a sprinkling of whimsy that she just about pulls off.
I didn’t love the film unconditionally. There is a deeply contrived symmetry in Vogel’s status as a new father who is learning how to be a good parent, and his dysfunctional relationship with his own dad. Butt on the whole h l its sweetness is irresistible. When Vogel’s wife ( Susan Kelechi Watson) hears that he is about to interview Mr Rogers, she says: ‘Please, don’t ruin my childhood.’ hildh d’ I expect U.S. audiences will sit down with the same throb of concern. We Brits, at least, don’t have to worry about that.
CLINT EASTWOOD’S new film Richard Jewell is another all-American tale, about another decent man, but with the worst of humanity at its core, not the best.
Jewell (brilliantly played by Paul Walter Hauser) was the security guard at the 1996 Atlanta olympics who spotted a rucksack containing a bomb. He helped to evacuate the area before it exploded, killing two people. But were it not for his vigilance, the death toll would have been much higher.
EASTWOOD turns 90 this year, but there’s no evidence that he ever nods off in the director’s chair. This is a pretty powerful film, with a theme he has explored in other recent pictures based on real events, such as 2016’ s Sully: ordinary people performing acts of heroism. As in Sully, though, our hero is put through the wringer — in this instance, at the hands of two institutions one senses Eastwood hasn’t much respect for: the FBI and theth media.
At first, Richard is lionised, until an FBI agent (Jon Hamm) decides he is not the harmless nerd he seems, but a classic sociopath who only ‘discovered’ the bomb because he planted it himself.
A tenacious reporter ( olivia Wilde) uses her sexual allure to get the story, and so the hero becomes the hunted. Richard, an overweight, slightly odd guy who still lives with his mother (the oscar- nominated Kathy Bates) and owns a collection of guns, fits the criminal profile tailored exactly for him. only his mum and his lawyer ( Sam Rockwell) believe in his innocence. It’s a sad story, all the more disturbing for being true, and it is well told, without frills. old Clint doesn’t do frills. long may he soldier on.