Documentary celebrates gentle giant of children’s TV
“Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” is a depressingly good documentary about a singularly empathetic television personality. Fred Rogers (19282003) knew what he was up against in a culture, and an economy, built on marketable aggression. Against long odds he prevailed. Now he belongs to another time. Can his spirit of gentle reassurance possibly be revived, in any form?
I wish I were more optimistic. The “bombardment” Rogers once described as commercial children’s programming, designed as he saw it to turn them into slavish consumers, is now amped up by digital addictions we’ve barely begun to process. One interview subject in director Morgan Neville’s film says it plainly: Today, “there isn’t room on TV for a nice person.”
Premiering in 1968, “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” offered a reliable security blanket to millions of young viewers. The ordained Presbyterian minister, husband and father seemed so unapologetically sincere, everyone assumed he must be hiding something. Without undue fawning, Neville does a lovely job of presenting Rogers as two people, the public and the private one, sharing the same closet full of zip-up sweaters.
He was a pudgy child, and he was bullied for it. He grew up in a household of means and loved music from an early age. He was ill a lot of the time and quarantined; his isolation fed his imagination, and his relatable feelings of insecurity and loneliness became the secret ingredient of the success that never entirely calmed his own feelings of inadequacy or creative panic.
This is carefully handled by Neville in a brisk nonfiction account, catnip for anyone with even passing affection for Rogers and his show. I didn’t watch it much as a kid, yet during “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” I was surprised at the emotional impact of simply hearing Rogers sing his own indelible theme song once again.
The documentary features interviews with Rogers’ widow, Joanne; his sons James and John, one of whom recalls, wryly, a childhood with “a second Christ” for a father; and various co-workers, among them Francois Clemmons, who played the neighborhood police officer on the long-running program.
Rogers had a direct line to the misunderstood 20th-century American child. The puppets he created, the nerve he displayed in addressing concepts of prejudice and even political assassination on “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” — everything was an extension of Rogers’ particular skill in letting his viewers know they weren’t alone in their anxieties.
“Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” debuted in fantastically divided 1968. One year later, then-President Richard Nixon threatened to cut the nascent public broadcasting budget in half. Rogers spoke before a U.S. Senate subcommittee weighing the yea or nay on the value of national public television.
Addressing the initially skeptical subcommittee chair, Sen. John Pastore, lifelong Republican Rogers talks about his desire to give children a respite from the rest of the noise. In a few earnest, wholly effective minutes, he secured $20 million in public broadcasting funding.
Neville’s previous work, notably “Twenty Feet From Stardom” (2012) and “Best of Enemies” (2015), revealed a filmmaker of easy humanity and a fine sense of humor. He was perfect, therefore, for this assignment.