Who is your favorite director? If you don’t have a favorite, think of any director who is well known? Has that director ever created a bad film or at least one that you thought could be better? Marielle Heller, the director of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, which marketing permits us to think is a biopic about Mister Rogers, the best man who existed in my lifetime, has never made a bad film. She actually may be one of the greatest American living directors of our time, but if you are familiar with her work, The Diary of a Teenage Girl and Can You Ever Forgive Me?, she may be your last pick to do a film about one of the most wholesome people in America. She is an independent filmmaker who is only beginning to attract mainstream accolades because usually her protagonists are unsavory females that belong to groups that we ignore, teenage girls and older, unsuccessful women; however she shares a trait with Mister Rogers: she loves broken people, and all people are broken.
Even though I was slightly spoiled regarding the structure of the narrative framing device, which I will not reveal, I still found myself resistant to Heller’s approach while I was watching the film and found it jarring. It is such an innovative structuring device that I do not recall ever being used before in a similar film so whomever came up with it should pat themselves on the back. Real art is usually impossible to accept upon first contact. Most viewers are overly familiar with Mister Rogers so any movie about him is going to face a certain amount of resistance because it is impossible to have an actor that looks and acts exactly as he would. This narrative framing device gives viewers a place to project those feelings that will arise after the inevitable comparison between our memories and the fiction.
The narrative framing device also allows us to relate to the protagonist, Lloyd Vogel, an investigative journalist played by The Americans’ Matthew Rhys, who is phenomenal. Even though the film is set in the late nineties in Manhattan and Pittsburgh, so it is a period piece just as rigorous and difficult to recreate as any historical dramatic film, it is emotionally closer to our world than not so Heller visually shows how dissonant it is for someone unfamiliar with Mister Rogers to enter Mister Rogers’ sphere of influence as if he was entering the Land of Make Believe. Like Vogel, I was resistant to this transition, but it eventually won me over because the filmmakers understood something that I did not. I went into this film wanting a biopic about Mister Rogers and my memory of him as a child, but A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood knows that what I needed was to feel what it is like to be with Mister Rogers as an adult and how his gift was not just restricted to children.
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood was the most successful American use of oneiric imagery and surrealism without it being able to become the butt of ridicule. Heller did what Rocketman could not without seeming absurd or heavy handed. She depicts the turbulent, psychological battle within her protagonist’s soul judiciously then stops when the character has emerged from the experience with some understanding of what he has struggled with and is ready to move on. Usually surreal imagery can overwhelm a movie or become the movie instead of being used as a tool to accomplish a task then put away when it is no longer necessary. What was once jarring, disruptive and an unwelcome intrusion of the world of emotion into the real world eventually dominates then recedes completely once addressed. Then the real world softens because the protagonist is changed, not the world.
If you read my critical review of Waves, I chastised it for not understanding what Heller did. Heller created a common, secular space for holy ground and hesed, a Hebrew word for rest, in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood just with stillness and silence within the movie and the theater. She also repeatedly managed to recreate and capture Mister Rogers ability to connect with each individual and for us to vicariously feel that connection and healing. What is more remarkable is that she did it using male characters thus continuing the mission of Mister Rogers: teaching emotional intelligence so people can live fuller lives with themselves and others.
I love Tom Hanks, but he is no Meryl Streep. He is the most affable entertainer of our time, but no chameleon. You hire him for likeability and the warm feelings that he elicits from his fans, but it is a very different sensation than Mister Rogers. I was so grateful for his hard work and effort to honor Mister Rogers. At times, he could not fully suppress himself, but I felt him concentrating so hard on his task. He is too physically large and smooth to quite become Mister Rogers, but I do not think anyone can do it. It is unfathomable. (Somewhere Christian Bale’s ears perked up, and he thought, “Challenge?”) What he was able to do is completely put himself in the backseat and do his best to change his physical presence, vocal delivery and his eagerness to fill the spaces with bonhomie.
Honestly the entire cast of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood was amazing. A special shout out goes to Susan Kelechi Watson from This Is Us for acting as the counterpoint to her onscreen husband. The wives in this film are in many ways the realistic, understanding, but also unafraid to express how the men in their lives put them out with their careers, issues and obsessions while they still have to function. I did not know Chris Cooper was in this film, and he is always a powerhouse. One of the people on Mister Rogers’ set reminded me of Nora Dunn—I think that it was Carmen Cusack. There was an urban grittiness to the people who worked on the set that made the film so much more delicious because their contrast to Mister Rogers explains how it could keep going, but all these hard people also clearly adore him and are willing to begrudgingly sacrifice a bit of functionality and practicality to be near him. Enrico Colantoni, one of my all time faves from Just Shoot Me and Veronica Mars, is one of those people who hopes to protect Mister Rogers from being too open.
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is the kind of movie that you will slowly find yourself softening to and hopefully you will leave a better person after seeing this film. It is generally suitable for all audiences though it is a movie for adults. I would also encourage you to watch Won’t You Be My Neighbor? if you still want that biopic. It is a magnificent documentary that will leave you crying profusely. I do think that this film does reveal important truths about Mister Rogers. He shows. He does not tell. He is not avoiding questions. He is answering them. The answers are a language that we forgot.
