84 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER25, 2019
Tom Hanks and Matthew Rhys star in Marielle Heller’s film about Mr. Rogers.
THECURRENTCINEMA
Our Country, Right and Wrong
“A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” and “The Report.”
BY ANTHONYLANE
ILLUSTRATION BY ZOHAR LAZAR
H
ow nice was Fred Rogers? So preter
naturally nice that, when a youth
ful Eddie Murphy spoofed him in “Mis
ter Robinson’s Neighborhood,” a running
skit on “Saturday Night Live,” Mr. Rog
ers—as everybody called him then and
still refers to him now, sixteen years after
his death—replied with the mild sug
gestion, on “Late Night with David Let
terman,” that many such parodies were
done “with real kindness in their hearts.”
Pause. Mr. Rogers turned to the audi
ence: “Do you think that?” He also
showed a Polaroid of Murphy and him
self, all smiles. Grudges were not worth
the bearing. That’s how nice he was.
What matters most, in that clip, is
the pause. And the pause is one of the
many things—the litany of timings, ex
pressions, and deeds—that Tom Hanks
gets right in his depiction of Mr. Rog
ers, in Marielle Heller’s “A Beautiful
Day in the Neighborhood.” As Mr.
Rogers enters the house at the start of
his TV show, we are offered the full
range of ceremonial tropes. The jacket
is hung up in the closet and replaced
by a zipped sweater. The outdoor shoes
are removed (Hanks makes sure to toss
’em lightly from hand to hand) and re
placed by footwear more suited to the
home. No chore is a drag. No detail de
serves to be ignored.
Whenever wellknown gestures, man
ual or vocal, are recreated with this care,
you are somehow compelled to exam
ine them afresh. That’s why we cleave
to great mimics; whether you prefer Jay
Mohr’s Christopher Walken imitation
to Kevin Pollak’s, for instance, the effect
of the comparison is to leave you a lit
tle more Walkenized—always a bless
ing. Likewise, in the new film, Hanks
leaves us not just consoled by Rogers
but curious about what drove him. In
addition to being the host, the com
poser, and the puppeteer on his own
show, from 1968 to 2001, Mr. Rogers
was a Presbyterian minister, and, thanks
to Hanks, the business with the shoes
and the sweater begins to resemble a
secular robing, as if we were in a vestry
rather than in a television studio. The
pauses, too, are more liturgical than po
lite. Mr. Rogers can’t see his parishion
ers, but he knows that they’re out there,
and he waits for their response.
Fans of Mr. Rogers should have had
their fill, you might think, after “Won’t
You Be My Neighbor?,” last year’s affable
documentary about him. Marielle Heller,
though, is not content with affing. She
likes to draw out recessive characters—
the unhappy, the untrustworthy, or the
downright unlikable—and bring them,
however uncertainly, into the light. In
“Can You Ever Forgive Me?,” also re
leased in 2018, this tricky feat was ac
complished with the help of Melissa
McCarthy and Richard E. Grant; now,
in the new film, Heller turns to Mat
thew Rhys. He plays Lloyd Vogel, a mag
azine journalist who, priding himself on
tough assignments, is taken aback when
told to interview Mr. Rogers. Lloyd has
a smart and loving wife, Andrea (Susan
Kelechi Watson), but a woeful relationship
with his estranged father, Jerry (Chris
Cooper). Not estranged enough, as far
as Lloyd is concerned, and father and
son come to blows at a family wedding.
A bashful Lloyd rolls up to meet Mr.
Rogers with his face cut and bruised. “A
softball injury,” he explains. Yeah, right.
From here on, you can see where the
story—wounded soul meets healer—is
heading, and, to be honest, I was half
dreading the result. It should be called
“The Hack Whisperer,” and it’s not a
film, let us say, that I would willingly
screen for Billy Wilder. There are toy
town sequences, in which a puppetsize
Lloyd suddenly finds himself, alive and
plaintive, amid the model buildings on
the set of the show. And I could have
done without the scene in the New York
subway, when Mr. Rogers is sponta
neously serenaded by a carriage filled
with admirers. Still, however obvious
the emotional setup, Heller, Hanks, and
Rhys manage, Lord knows how, to skirt
the pitfalls of mush, and to forge some
thing unexpectedly strong.
Anyone hoping for shocking dis
closures from “A Beautiful Day in the
Neighborhood” will go away disap
pointed, and the article that Lloyd pre
sents to his editor is clearly more paean
than exposé. Yet the film, to its credit,
provides far from comfortable viewing,
and some of the silences are deliberately
awkward. At the end of a show, once
everyone has departed, we see Mr. Rog
