Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

“This movie is almost like a memorial service in his honor,” my husband remarked, noting that toward the end, it stirs in us a pronounced feeling of great loss.

He really hit on something there.

But Won’t You Be My Neighbor? is something more than a mere tribute to a great man. It’s not some puff piece. It’s actually a very bold piece of filmmaking.

It dares to focus on the actual agenda of Fred Rogers. This is a pretty bold move since most biographical documentaries follow one of two approaches. They either sing the subject’s praises or rake up the most scandal about him as possible. This one chooses the more difficult task of exploring the meat of the subject’s actual ideas. Mr. Rogers knew that something need not be scintillating nor sordid nor sensationalized to hold an audience’s interest.

The Good:
Won’t You Be My Neighbor? presents Fred Rogers as a radical, not somebody trying to create scandal to get attention, but a true radical like Jesus or Socrates, someone whose ideas are unusual, easily misunderstood, and potentially disturbing.

I watched a lot of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood as a child, but I never realized how radical it was until watching this documentary.

The audience actually gasped at a couple of moments when we saw segments from the show that really touched on hot button issues of the day. We often think of Mr. Rogers as being meek, but here we see a man bold enough to challenge the establishment or address sensitive material directly. One gets the impression that in the early years, television programming for adults might even have been censored if it attempted to talk about such thorny topics, but nobody paid that kind of attention to a children’s show…except the children watching, who listened to every word.

What Mr. Rogers chose to bring up and discuss is almost staggering. Many adults were afraid to address some of these topics, and here’s Fred Rogers, calmly using puppets to talk to children about race relations, segregation, assassinations, problematic thoughts and feelings (anger, unworthiness, resentment, fear).

I love the way the documentary highlights Rogers’s ongoing frustration that many people might be misunderstanding his work, not realizing what the show was doing, not taking him seriously.

In the film, he comes across as a truth speaker, often baffled and sometimes angry that so many people fail to recognize the value of such truth.

Late in the film, Rogers himself says in an earlier interview that we must find a way “to make goodness attractive.” (I think those are his words.) Why can’t we do that? Why do cynicism and commercialism seem such inevitable trappings of adulthood? The values Rogers championed–empathy, listening, courtesy, affirmation, genuine engagement, thoughtfulness, emotional intelligence, consideration–these are qualities which indisputably enhance life. We should all value them, but so often our society treats them as unimportant, or, at best, unattainable.

These are the ways in which Rogers really is like a saint. He’s a truth teller who seems a bit too good for this world. We admire what he gave us, but nobody seems able to emulate him perfectly. Our better selves fall short, and our worse selves actively resist.

Of course, the movie is a call for us to try to be better. Mr. Rogers taught all of us. The latter portion of the film does build to a tremendous sense of what we have lost with his passing. But I think the idea is that we are supposed to pick up the mantle and use Rogers’s philosophies to change the world one person at a time. It’s a tremendously inspiring yet simultaneously sad film because we’re left with the desire to put his teachings into practice, but we know, somehow, that we can’t really do it.

Except for a couple of blink-and-you-miss-them glimpses into his past, the film focuses on Fred’s professional life in television, especially the creation and evolution of his popular children’s show. Won’t You Be My Neighbor? gives us clips from the show intermixed with new narration from and interviews by important figures in Rogers’s personal and professional life. Occasionally we get an animated sequence, highlighting the insight that Daniel Tiger essentially was Fred Rogers.

The documentary is well made, clearly engineered to elicit maximum emotional response from the audience. (One bit is saved for the very end, optimally placed to be sure we really feel it.) Morgan Neville has amazing material to work with, and he’s quite skilled at organizing it.

Also, the original music by Jonathan Kerkscey is fantastic.

Best Scene:
I think everyone should see this film, so I don’t want to spoil any of the best material. But this documentary with great subtlety and artistry almost re-imagines Rogers as radical crusader for social justice who deliberately tackled difficult issues facing society head on. He didn’t do it to create controversy. He did it to help children, not just to “educate” them, but to respond to their emotional needs, to serve as a positive, guiding, reassuring force in their development who could give them the skills, insight, and support to navigate and possibly repair a tricky world. Some of the material addressed in the show is almost shocking in its boldness.

One of these clips from the show with accompanying narration to contextualize it for us is probably the best scene. The documentary is skillfully made, but Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood itself provides the best material.

I personally found Lady Aberlin’s duet with Daniel Tiger incredibly moving, especially with the commentary, pointing out that the voice of doubt is never silenced.

In the real world, answers are not always easy and issues aren’t immediately resolved, but we can still learn ways to cope and survive.

I like the way that Mr. Rogers established trust by not lying. He gave children real coping strategies rather than neat, pat answers.

Best Action Sequence:
I absolutely love the montage of the unorthodox way Mr. Rogers filled and presented time on the show. The point is that he wasn’t afraid of a slower pace, had no desire to bombard children with constant, frenetic stimulation, demonstrated that something need not be fast and overproduced to be interesting. It’s quite hilarious to see his pointed unorthodoxy in practice, some of the painfully slow, protracted, quiet ways he lets the time pass on screen. And yet, while laughing, you can’t help but observe, “This is so true. Genuine human interactions need not be selling anything. Why can’t everyone just take a moment to engage genuinely with someone else? Human interaction is such a gift and such a necessity. Why are we always in such a hurry?”

Best Scene Visually:
I enjoyed learning the full story of the significance of 143 (which unfolds slowly and haltingly, gently suggesting clues rather than insisting on a narrative).

Also, obviously, the scene of Rogers and Officer Clemmons in the little pool sends a couple of powerful visual messages. Of all those interviewed, François Clemmons provides some of the most powerful, moving, and complicated material.

Her absence among the interviewees is heavily felt. It’s really conspicuous. For one thing, so many other people connected with the show are interviewed. For another, she appears constantly in the old footage from the show, just in case anyone forgot to think of her (which seems impossible to me. When I was a child, Lady Aberlin was by far my favorite character. I remember telling my mother that I thought she was so much prettier than Lady Elaine, which now seems incredibly silly since Lady Elaine was a) a bit of a harridan and b) a tiny puppet). Of course, Lady Aberlin was quite lovely, conventionally attractive, but as a child, my notion of what was attractive had more to do with kindness than anything else. By any standard, Lady Aberlin was a beautiful soul and a huge presence on the show.)

When I got home, I set out to solve the mystery of Aberlin’s absence. After a lot of searching, I finally discovered in an interview with the director that he had, in fact, enjoyed numerous conversations with her, but that she had declined to appear on camera.

Part of me wonders if this is because people are such jerks. Before I found the interview, I stumbled across one of those obnoxious TMZ ‘Memba Her? pieces about her. (Those always rub me the wrong way. They show pictures taken decades apart, pointedly demonstrating that the subject has aged. Ostensibly, this is to remind readers that the person exists, but TMZ never uses a flattering second photo. So the implication always seems to be, “Apparently you’ve fallen into obscurity, and also now you look old.”  Gee, thanks.  The comment thread on Aberlin’s piece struck me as particularly nasty, especially in light of the surprising fact that she was literally engaging with the commenters herself. If she’s treated that way all the time, of course she doesn’t want to do interviews! I don’t know if that is the issue, but I do know that the TMZ thing made me so outraged on her behalf that I just had to mention it.

At any rate, Aberlin apparently did participate in the making of the film, so her absence isn’t because she’s being silenced or didn’t approve of the director’s take on the subject.

I do wish, though, that the film had shown us more interviewees. I’m certainly glad to hear from Rogers’s wife and sons and from cast and crew members, but I wish we had heard from a few more people, too. (Surely he had other non-cleric friends besides Yo-Yo Ma!).

Another minor annoyance is that the film gives interview subjects’ names only once at the beginning. (Maybe it’s more than once. I can’t be sure, but the names are only given early on and not often.) By the end of the film, my husband and I had a hard time remembering who everybody was. Rogers’ widow and sons and Yo-Yo Ma and François Clemmons, those were easy to remember. But there were so many others that we couldn’t really keep straight. Seeing their names again at least once or twice would have been helpful.

My only other slight critique of the film is that it often co-opts tragedy for its own purposes. Do we really need to see Christa McAuliffe’s students watch the Challenger explode to understand why Mr. Rogers helped bring comfort to the nation in such situations? Then again, the film does undeniably make us feel things, and I enjoyed having my emotions tapped, so perhaps I shouldn’t question Morgan Neville’s methods.

Overall:
My mother has said many times that she never understood the appeal of Mr. Rogers until the show came on one day when I was not even a year old. Mr. Rogers spoke, and immediately, I stopped what I was doing and gave him my undivided attention. Apparently his teachings (or at least his methods) sunk in because I regularly engage with my own children using a stuffed cat as my more audacious alter ego.

My guess is that most adults will react to this documentary the same way that little me reacted to Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.

Though years have passed and times have changed, the appeal of Mr. Rogers has not diminished.  Go watch the film, and if you’re like me and can’t stop singing all his catchy songs you remember from childhood, be aware that you can stream the entire show on Amazon Prime right now.  That’s what my kids and I have been doing.