My wife and I saw "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood" last night. I was too old to have been a Mr Rogers fan, but I was aware he existed.
First off, it turned out to be a film worth watching. Like an episode of Mr Rogers' Neighborhood, it rolls slowly, but it's saying a lot.
It's also kind of surreal at times. And there were a couple of places where a bit of Tom Hanks' drawl came out sounding kind of Forrest Gump-ish.
This is "inspired" by a real circumstance. An investigative reporter known for expose stories was assigned to do a story on Fred Rogers. He intended to do a "kill" piece uncovering the "real" Fred Rogers, but what he uncovered was a Fred Rogers that was pretty much what we saw on television. That was about as true to life as this movie is. Many of the details of the story are changed or fictional. The actual reporter, however, has endorsed the movie as true to how Rogers affected his life.
The entire story is told within a framework of a Mr Rogers show, with Mr Rogers introducing his audience to his new friend, showing a picture of a startled-looking man with a bruised nose: Reporter Lloyd Vogel. He tells us Lloyd has a problem, and then the story begins. The story is far more about Vogel and how his life is changed by Rogers than about Mr Rogers himself, so it's not really a biopic.
Most of the "outside" shots, particularly when people are taking transportation from place to place, are shots of the toy Mr Rogers neighborhood. So you see the Mr Rogers toy cars going down the playland street, toy airplanes taking off from the playtown runway, et cetera. That keeps reminding you that you are seeing a story being told by Mr Rogers.
When Vogel first tells his wife that he's doing a story on Mr Rogers, she of course knows what kind of stories he writes, so she warns him, "Please don't ruin my childhood."
Vogel's life is severely off track in a couple of major ways, but first he has to contend with Fred Rogers. Rogers has a disconcerting way of responding to hostile questions (I said "responding," not "answering") by going straight to the subtext, not to the context. He discerns from the questions that the reporter is really troubled by something else, and he put his finger on that trouble, trying to find a way to help the reporter.
Fred Rogers also has a disarming way of accepting a hurtful criticism by ignoring the intention to harm and accepting the criticism with genuine gratitude: "Thank you for that observation. That's good to know."
In other words, Rogers continually messes with the reporter's head by his unexpected expression of kindness at every turn. But Rogers' kindness is not weakness. Rogers knows exactly who this reporter is and what this reporter does, but the movie presents him intentionally overcoming evil by doing good (
Romans 12:21).
They do touch on Fred Rogers' Christianity being a primary factor of his character, and they do get a lot of details correct about the way he lived his actual life.
It's not an
exciting movie as movies these days go (not a single explosion or car chase). It paces about the same as a Mr Rogers show. Also, it's not a movie for small children (it may be too deep even for a lot of teens), but it is a movie that leaves you wanting to be a better person.