Hanks and Rhys make Heller’s neighborhood worth visiting
I know a lot of folks who rolled their eyes when they heard that Tom Hanks was going to star as the beloved children’s show host Mr. Rogers. “Can’t this man ever play a serial killer?” they grumbled. While it’s true that in the new film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood Hanks adds yet another saintly character to his resume of real-life hero portrayals (see: Sully, Captain Phillips, Saving Mr. Banks, and Bridge of Spies, to name a few), cynics should unroll their eyes into a forward-facing position long enough to go see this film. First, Hanks actually isn’t even the lead here; Matthew Rhys (The Americans), as a skeptical and unhappy journalist, is. Secondly, and perhaps most critically, Hanks gives a complex and genuinely moving performance.
In her first picture since last year’s Can You Ever Forgive Me?, director Marielle Heller again provides the kind of surefooted direction that yielded an Oscar nomination and a win, respectively, for her CYEFM stars Melissa McCarthy and Richard E. Grant. Although Hanks looks nothing remotely like Fred Rogers, under Heller’s direction, Hanks so completely embodies Rogers’s persona, including mastering the particular cadence of his measured, soft-spoken speech, that you soon forget you’re watching Tom Hanks, the benevolent actor, and begin to embrace Mr. Rogers, the warmhearted Presbyterian minister turned children’s advocate and champion.
Many are already familiar with Mr. Rogers and his special way of making all children — and adults, too, for that matter — feel good about themselves, either from memories of watching his PBS show as a child, or from viewing Morgan Neville’s terrific, award-winning 2018 documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor. With that film so recently imprinted in the public memory, Heller is careful not to cover the same ground. Instead, the inspiration for Heller’s dramatic feature comes from journalist Tom Junod’s 1998 Esquire article “Can You Say Hero?”. The film is careful to note that the film is “inspired by” not “based on” the article, as many elements have been fictionalized, including changing the writer’s name to Lloyd Vogel (Rhys). If you are really curious about what’s been changed in the picture — and what the real Tom Junod thinks of it — you can check out the follow up piece Junod wrote in this month’s Atlantic.
Despite the liberties they take with the narrative, however, Heller and writers Noah Harpster and Micah Fitzerman-Blue (Transparent) deftly capture the tone and underlying theme of Junod’s original essay. Lloyd is presented as a hard-hitting but difficult journalist who has a reputation for alienating his subjects. When his no-nonsense editor Ellen (Christine Lahti) assigns him what he scornfully considers to be a short fluff piece on Mr. Rogers for a special “heroes” issue of the magazine, Lloyd is immediately reluctant. He acquiesces only when Ellen tells him Mr. Rogers is one of the few interviewees who has agreed to speak with him.
And so we have our indifferent, dubious protagonist, already assigned a task he doesn’t want, forced to meet with a man who is his polar opposite: patient, kind, and understanding. Under Mr. Rogers’s unwavering acceptance, both Lloyd’s emotional walls and his suspicions of Mr. Rogers’s innate goodness gradually melt. Lloyd’s emotional awakening is the crux of Heller’s movie, and makes for a story that even the most jaded among us can’t help but be moved by.
Lloyd, a new father who is married to the loving but worried Andrea (Susan Kelechi Watson), is wrestling with his own insecurities as a father and husband. These feelings are amplified after Jerry (Chris Cooper, very good), Lloyd’s estranged father, unexpectedly re-enters Lloyd’s life. Mr. Rogers never stops pushing the closed-off Lloyd to examine and confront his feelings regarding his father, his late mother, and the childhood resentments that Lloyd has continued to carry into adulthood. While that may sound like a bit of a heavy throughline, Hanks and Rhys are so natural, and the story unfolds so authentically, that we never feel like we’ve been thrown into a weighty therapy session. Rather, we have the profound experience of watching two human beings connect, and become powerfully changed because of that connection.
And that, perhaps, is the real message of both Mr. Rogers, the person, and Heller’s movie: with a little kindness and forgiveness, we can all come to some understanding of each other and our shortcomings, even with those who may have hurt us, or with whom we disagree. We are all broken in some way, Heller’s picture tells us, but that should make us more compassionate with one another, not less. “Anything mentionable is manageable,” Mr. Rogers tells Lloyd, when Lloyd asks him about some of the serious topics like divorce and death that Mr. Rogers has addressed on his show.
And so while we, like Lloyd, never quite figure out what makes Mr. Rogers tick (thanks, in large part, to Hanks’s understated, appropriately enigmatic performance), we, too, come to believe that, in the end, all we need to know are Mr. Rogers’s lessons. We are all capable of forgiveness, and we all are worthy of such kindness. We are, after all, residents of the same flawed but beautiful human neighborhood.
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A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood opens today at Bay Area theaters.
