Warm, welcoming and very well done
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
K (out of 4) Starring Tom Hanks, Matthew Rhys, Susan Kelechi Watson, Chris Cooper, Enrico Colantoni, Maryann Plunkett, Tammy Blanchard, Wendy Makkena, Sakina Jaffrey and Carmen Cusack. Written by Noah Harpster and Micah Fitzerman-Blue. Directed by Marielle Heller. Opens Friday at theatres everywhere. 109 minutes. PG
“A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” finds Tom Hanks fitting the red sweater and comfortable sneakers of Fred Rogers like he was born in them.
And could you honestly imagine any other actor in this role? The usually uptempo Hanks downshifts into the cadence and charisma of the late children’s TV personality with a smoothness that’s almost surreal. A tape of Hanks just reading the script could lull a rampaging rhino to sleep.
Yet this unique take on Rogers’ magnetism by director Marielle Heller (“Can You Ever Forgive Me?”) exceeds impersonation. This is a movie of heart, empathy and invention, but it’s no biopic — last year’s award-winning doc “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” already covered that ground.
It’s a demonstration of the man’s positivity in motion, as seen in the attitude change it brings to disbelieving New York magazine journalist Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys), who feels like he’s being punished when he’s assigned to write a profile on the small-fry superstar from Pittsburgh. (The screenplay by Noah Harpster and Micah Fitzerman-Blue is inspired by an award-winning 1998 “Esquire” piece by Tom Junod, titled, “Can You Say ... Hero?”)
Lloyd is a National Magazine Award winner, and he feels the assignment is beneath his lofty stature. He’s also convinced that there must be something sinister behind the perpetual smiles and make-believe puppets and props of the long-running show called “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” which has a theme song that’s the ultimate earworm. (You’re humming it to yourself right now, aren’t you?)
The snobbish cynicism of sadeyed Lloyd is born in part from the anxiety he feels being the dad of an infant son, co-parenting with his wife Andrea (Susan Kelechi Watson). He’s conflicted about how best to raise his child, since his own father, Jerry (Chris Cooper), is a sad excuse for a dad, having abandoned the family years ago when Lloyd’s mother was dying from cancer. The two get into a fist fight at the wedding of Lloyd’s sister, her third trip up the altar.
Fred Rogers instinctively picks up on the internal misery that Lloyd tries to hide beneath feigned objectivity. Fred has had his own share of family struggles — he has two grown sons with wife Joanne — but he long ago learned to cope with them by the judicious application of patience, prayer, music and a daily swimming regime.
Most important, Fred has learned to communicate in a manner that suggests there is nobody more important to him than the person he is talking to, whether on a one-to-one basis or via the big electronic hug that is his TV show. A show that Heller recreates visually and emotionally by having her film match the peculiar daydream rhythms of the TV creation. She brings us into “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” in a manner that suggests she too, really, really cares about us, about what we think and how we feel. And you know what Fred would say about that:
It’s good to talk ... It’s good to say the things we feel ...