Rating: PG
Runtime: 1 hour, 49 minutes
Director: Marielle Heller
Quick Impressions:
I went into this movie curious about Tom Hanks and left it thinking about Fred Rogers.
Honestly, mustering the enthusiasm to see this film took me quite a while. I mean, I love Mr. Rogers as much as the next person, but I just saw the crowd-pleasing if Oscar-snubbed Won’t You Be My Neighbor last year. It was one of my favorite films of 2018, and Mr. Rogers is an American icon and no doubt a saint (whether he likes the term or not), but how many Mr. Rogers films do we need within a two-year-period? Plus for some weird reason, when I looked at the production stills of Tom Hanks dressed as Mr. Rogers, I had this eerie, inexplicable feeling that I had already seen him play the part before, which evolved into a vague worry that perhaps Hanks and Rogers had always been the same person, but somehow none of us had noticed this until now. When I mentioned this odd line of thinking out loud, my husband chimed in that he had similar feelings. “It’s almost like the Mandela Effect,” he joked.
Here’s the other thing. People keep saying that Tom Hanks will be nominated for Best Supporting Actor this year, but I’ll believe that when I see it. Yes, this week he’s shown up in the Golden Globe nominations and the SAG nominations, but Hanks hasn’t been nominated for an Oscar in almost twenty years, and he works steadily and gives great performances in really baity projects. Even though supposedly everybody loves him, for whatever reason, this love does not translate into Oscar nominations. Maybe the Academy feels that winning back-to-back Best Actor Oscars is enough, and they don’t care if it happened one-hundred years ago! Maybe the explanation involves some type of fairy tale curse. I don’t know. Something’s going on! His work in Captain Philips was superb. The moment at the end when he goes into shock is some of the finest acting I’ve ever seen, and that he didn’t even get nominated for Best Actor that year is the most egregious Oscar snub I can recall in all the years I’ve been watching. (And I mean, I started watching when I was a little kid in the 1980s.) It was great that Barkhad Abdi won Best Supporting Actor, but that doesn’t make up for the Hanks snub, which is baffling and unjust. If the Academy didn’t vote for that performance, why should they vote for this one?
Still, I thought I should see this buzzy performance and the film and kept trying to talk myself into it. Finally I reminded myself, “Marielle Heller directed this, and her Can You Ever Forgive Me? was one of your favorite movies last year!” (And it was! I loved that film. A lot.)
I didn’t like this one quite as much. But I still love Mr. Rogers. And after seeing the performance myself, I am completely sold on the idea of Tom Hanks playing him. He’s magnificent. Honestly the nuance of his performance raises some questions in my mind and makes me wish we were getting an entire movie about Mr. Rogers instead of one featuring him as a supporting character.
The Good:
Well, now who am I kidding? This entire movie is about Mr. Rogers because you can’t understand Mr. Rogers without looking at the way he gave himself to others. He was so present in all his relationships. He is perhaps the greatest American networker, and he considered networking itself rewarding, not a means to an end, but the primary activity of human life. I get that. He touched lives and hearts, and he did that because he prioritized that. I can appreciate that A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood shows Mr. Rogers in action. To see who he was and what made him great, we need to observe him with other people and see the difference he made in their lives. And it is best to focus on just one of these people’s stories because that’s the relationship Mr. Rogers offered to all of us when he turned to stare directly into the camera to talk to us, a personal one.
This definitely comes across in the movie, which is based on the relationship between Mr. Rogers and journalist Tom Junod who profiled him for Esquire in the late 90s. In the film, Junod is fictionalized as Lloyd Vogel, a reporter whose life (I had heard) doesn’t match up with Junod’s point by point. As I understand it, the Mr. Rogers material is real, but the details of the Junod (now Vogel) story are heavily embroidered. (Well, I mean, I think more than embroidered. Let’s say fictionalized. Maybe even invented.) Basically, the movie’s Tom Junod/Mr. Rogers interactions are essentially authentic, whereas the whole “Lloyd Vogel” storyline is entirely fabricated. When he met Mr. Rogers, Junod didn’t have a baby son, and he didn’t punch his estranged father at his sister’s wedding. Junod’s father was a serial adulterer but never left his mother, who outlived her husband. It’s all made up for the movie. Junod did actually have a childhood toy called Old Rabbit, though.
The minute I got home from the movie (well, actually several hours later, after putting my children to bed), I began looking into the Lloyd Vogel aka Tom Junod storyline, reading everything I could. To my surprise, I suddenly realized that I know Tom Junod (not personally). I recognized his face and then recalled that I had seen him speak extensively in the Won’t You Be My Neighbor documentary last year. I probably should have made the connection immediately, but in my defense, that documentary never reinforces the contributors’ names. It basically only identifies them the first time they speak. Plus in the Marielle Heller movie, his character is called Lloyd Vogel, so that was the name in my head as I watched.
Anyway, I read Junod’s original profile of Mr. Rogers in Esquire, and I must say that the film is a pretty faithful dramatization of that piece. Nearly everything we see from Mr. Rogers in the movie is taken from Junod’s Esquire profile. I then went on to read some other more recent pieces about Mr. Rogers by Junod and also the transcripts of a couple of recent interviews. After all of that reading, I realized that 1) I am actually familiar with some of Junod’s other work. I definitely read the notorious article he wrote about Kevin Spacey in the 90s back when it originally came out. 2) I like Tom Junod’s own writing better than the screenplay of this movie, and I wish they had kept the story more faithful to his own. (But more on that later.) The good news is, Junod is putting together a book about his relationship with Mr. Rogers, so if you liked this story, there’s more.
A lot didn’t quite click for me in this particular Mr. Rogers story, but the Tom Hanks performance is outstanding. To be honest, Hanks is far better in the role than I had anticipated. Not only does he thoroughly convince us that he’s Mr. Rogers–it’s oddly easy to accept him as Mr. Rogers, actually–but he also teases out some depth and complexity in the character with dexterous subtlety. After watching the entire movie, I am not convinced that subtlety and nuance is even suggested by the screenplay. I see it nowhere else. I think Hanks is bringing it himself, and I’m going to credit it to him until I hear otherwise.
So the Hanks performance is tremendous. I’m not even a particular fan of Tom Hanks. (I do admire him as an actor, but if I’m being honest, the thought of seeing him in a movie rarely excites me.) I’m saying this not to insult Hanks, but to emphasize that the praise I’m heaping on this performance isn’t just the delirious rhapsodies of a starstruck admirer. His acting here is brilliant. I didn’t even feel excited for this movie at all, and he truly impressed me in the role. He did more with it than I expected.
The movie also has amazing visuals. Besides the Hanks performance (and the life lessons from Mr. Rogers), the best part of the film is its clever use of visual cues to set up and advance the story. This aspect of the movie I truly loved. We see Mr. Rogers first, and the film is presented to us as an extended episode of the show. So when we travel to New York to find Lloyd, we see the model city streets from the intro. Instead of following the trolley to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, we go all the way to New York. (Since the entire Lloyd story is fabricated but contains emotional truth, this essentially is a journey into make-believe.) Similarly, when we are about to see Lloyd at work, Mr. Rogers shows us a film on Picture Picture about how magazines are made.
Best Scene:
Best Scene Visually:
Most Oscar Worthy Moment, Tom Hanks:
The Negatives:
A huge problem that I had with this movie is that I just didn’t care that much about the characters who weren’t Mr. Rogers. I wanted to care about Lloyd, and I will admit that he grew on me. By the time he was up with his baby in the middle of the night getting lured into a late night drink, I was somewhat invested in him. It isn’t that I disliked him. I just didn’t have that much emotional investment in him one way or another. It probably didn’t help that I don’t really know Matthew Rhys. I’ve never seen The Americans. Plus, I knew that the Lloyd Vogel story wasn’t completely true, but as I watched, I didn’t know if any of it was true or what. So it felt low stakes and fake and contrived to me. I kept thinking, “Chris Cooper is doing a good job,” and that’s part of the problem. I kept thinking of him as Chris Cooper. I never got lost in that part of the story and believed he was Lloyd’s father…because I didn’t believe in Lloyd. I thought he was just an imaginary friend. And he basically is. I know that isn’t fair because most movies are about fictional characters, and I get totally emotionally invested in some of those.
I don’t like the harshness of my own critique here, but I’m just being really honest. The Lloyd storyline just never moved me that much. I tried hard to care, and I just didn’t (which is sad because at the beginning of the movie, Mr. Rogers asks me to become invested in Lloyd).
On the other hand, I believed in Mr. Rogers. Despite its shortcomings, Bohemian Rhapsody last year gave me the eerie feeling as I watched that Freddie Mercury was using Rami Malek as a living vessel to reach out to the audience from beyond the grave. I felt the same way about Hanks, that he was channeling Mr. Rogers, becoming a willing conduit for Mr. Rogers’ spirit, bringing the man to life for us. I don’t mean that exactly literally, but maybe a part of me does. Fred Rogers was a great soul whose life was his message. All an actor must do is be self-effacing enough to get out of the way and let us hear Mr. Rogers through him. But that is far from easy.
My point is, the film felt unbalanced in that way. The interactions with Mr. Rogers felt more true, more authentic than the rest of Lloyd’s life. And I mean, in fact, that is the case. Those moments with Mr. Rogers feel true and authentic because they are true and authentic. Mr. Rogers is already one of those people who feels like he’s more present than one-hundred more ordinary people. In this case, he really is more real than the rest of the story.
The idea of Lloyd punching out his father at his sister’s wedding is honestly less interesting than what Junod himself describes when talking about his own father. His thoughts about feeling destined to be like the highly flawed father he idolized until Mr. Rogers opened his eyes to the idea that he could choose a different type of equally valid masculinity through his own agency–I would rather have seen that movie. Everybody can agree that punching out your father at your sister’s wedding is a disordered state of things. Surely anyone would already understand that extreme situation shouldn’t be happening even without a Mr. Rogers figure involved.
Ultimately, this was a movie I wanted to like more than I did. Intellectually, I thought so many elements were clever and well done. But I just couldn’t get as emotionally invested as I wanted to be. I never lost myself in the film emotionally. Now, I cried several times, but it was almost always at the marvel of Mr. Rogers.