Everybody’s Fine

In A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, Mister Rogers saves a journalist’s soul (and maybe yours).

the revelation of Morgan Neville’s wonderful 2018 documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor? was that, away from the camera, Fred “Mister” Rogers really was that guy. An ordained Presbyterian minister who kept doctrine well out of his TV show, he endeavored to make every boy and girl feel loved, his bugaboo not Satan but a child’s harsh self-judgment and its attendant despair or cynicism. The hook of the fictionalized Fred Rogers story A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is what happens when Mister Rogers (played by Tom Hanks) comes face-to-face with a hardened cynic, an Esquire journalist named Lloyd Vogel

(Matthew Rhys) who’s on assignment for a profile he didn’t ask for and doesn’t want to do. Lloyd doesn’t believe in benevolent patriarchs—not since his father (Chris Cooper) abandoned the family when Lloyd’s mother got sick. He’s an angry, angry man, hardly able to be present with his wife, Andrea (Susan Kelechi

Watson), and baby son or to maintain eye contact with his beatific magazine subject. But Mister Rogers can smell despair. It falls to this Magic Christian to give Lloyd a safe space to show his vulnerability, gently but firmly ushering the journalist into his “neighborhood” with its ratty puppets and choo-choo train. Can you say “Forgive Daddy”?

In other hands, this material might have been played for bad laughs or even for horror, but these hands have made of it a secular salvation story—a feelgood movie for people who can laugh at themselves for succumbing to a feel-good movie. It disarms a lot of people you’d think would be immune. They say, “I actually liked that”—emphasis on “actually,” as if they couldn’t believe they’d gone so soft. But there’s more than softness at work. Watching our nicest Hollywood star playing our nicest children’s host, you don’t want to look like a lost soul. There’s peer pressure to go squishy.

I actually liked about two-thirds of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood; I got impatient when Mister Rogers receded

into the background and the film turned full time to solving the problems of Lloyd, who is based on the magazine writer Tom Junod. It’s not that Lloyd is boring. He’s just not that special. Not compared to Mister Rogers, anyway. But as I write that, I feel a twinge of shame. Mister Rogers said everyone was special. One of his lyrics was “Everybody’s fancy, everybody’s fine / Your body’s fancy, and so is mine.” You see, I know all the songs. As a kid, I even wrote to Mister Rogers to thank him for making me feel less judged, and though I didn’t hear back, I know the message got through, because the local PBS station made sure to send me fundraising letters every year. (“Mister Rogers tells us you’re a big fan of his!”) Perhaps if he had written back, I wouldn’t have become so judgmental myself. I wouldn’t have been a critic. Or I’d have been the friendliest, most blurbable critic. Ah, well. In this movie, Mister Rogers reduces Lloyd to a blubbering child, and I envied the guy.

Directed by Marielle Heller (Can You Ever Forgive Me?), the movie has a neat visual hook. The cityscapes are cardboardlike, as in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and Mister Rogers introduces the film as if it were an episode of a show in which we’ll meet his friend Lloyd. He opens, of course, with “It’s a beautiful day in this neighborhood, a beautiful day for a neighbor / Would you be mine?” while jauntily changing from a sports coat and shoes to a zip-up sweater and sneakers. I studied Hanks closely, let me tell you. His movements are a little jerkier than the real Fred Rogers’s, but this isn’t meant to be an exact impersonation. It’s Hanks merging his own gentle public persona with Rogers’s and allowing the teeniest bit of irony to creep in—as if Rogers sees through Lloyd’s obfuscations but bides his time gently tugging Lloyd toward health.

You can see in Hanks the almost childish, almost naughty pleasure Rogers must have felt when he’d stop his show’s taping for over an hour to play with a visiting autistic boy while assistants peered helplessly at their watches. The movie is honestly hilarious when we see Mister Rogers mess up the folding of a tent and refuse to do another take on the grounds that children need to learn that even adults’ plans can go wrong.

Matthew Rhys’s Lloyd is antsy and high-strung, with a smile that relaxes into a grimace, but he’s also—he can’t help it— rather lovable. I hate to say this, given that Rhys was peerless on The Americans and proves he can hold his own in a movie, but I wish the role had been played by a wilder, more profane actor, a young Jack Nicholson type or even an amorphously scuzzy Method man like Joaquin Phoenix. Imagine Joaquin Phoenix assigned to profile Fred Rogers—that’s funny.

As Lloyd’s dad, Cooper has some of that scuzziness, but he loses his edge along with everyone else. In its final act, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood slows down and turns maudlin, as if Mister Rogers had weighed in on the story line. Look, I’m not dumping on Mister Rogers. I told you I wrote him a fan letter. I cried when he died. I just wouldn’t want him as my script doctor. A fuller movie would have found a way to acknowledge that kids need the antic and the unruly as much as they need the Golden Rule.

But as I write that, I feel another twinge of shame. My inner Mister Rogers wants a word with you now: Can you say hello to my friend David? He’s a film critic. Critics think if they’re too nice, people might think they’re not very smart. But people who are nice are the smartest of all, don’t you think? They would like this movie very much, all the way through. Can you say, “One of the year’s best?” ■