A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood

“Once upon a time, there was a boy who didn’t like himself very much. It was not his fault. He was born with cerebral palsy. Cerebral palsy is something that happens to the brain.” – Tom Junod, “Can You Say… Hero?”, Esquire, 6 April 2017

Aching and breathless from the sprint from my hotel room to the theater around the block, cradling a recently torn rotator cuff, grimacing through chronic spinal pain, somehow powering through my cerebral palsy to make the 9:45 screening of A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD, I get a phone call.  It’s the dog daycare back in Dallas.  Fortunately, they’re just calling to tell me her five day supply of medication ended.  “Oh good,” I thought, cynically, “Thanks for giving me a heart attack just to tell me what I already know.”

Ten years old going on two, Ophelia has pancreatitis.  Last weekend we spent the evening in the emergency room (hence the medication).  Two years ago, having silver dollar-sized chunks of tissue removed from her abdomen, she survived cancer.  Through all her hardships she remains committed to improving the lives of others through empathy, love, and humor.  One look from her will capture and hold your attention, and pretty soon you’ll find yourself too preoccupied studying her facial expression to remember whatever’s stressing you out.  I like to believe there’s a phrase for this effect, but I’ll come back to that.

In Marielle Heller’s A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD, Tom Hanks and Matthew Rhys play Fred Rogers and Lloyd Vogel.  Millions know Rogers from his KQED show, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, which ran from 1966 until 2001, and ended syndication on my 34th birthday in 2008.  Vogel’s burgeoning friendship with Mister Rogers borrows from journalist Tom Junod’s profile of Fred Rogers in the April 6, 2017, issue of Esquire.

BEAUTIFUL DAY’s central conflict arises from Vogel’s reputation as a muckraker.  Expecting a second child with his wife, Andrea (Susan Kelechi Watson) and surfing the waves of a decimated relationship with his estranged, alcoholic father who unilaterally decides to attend his sister’s wedding, Vogel is exactly the  distanced cynic I thought I was.  Unable to process how anyone can be so kind, he pries at Fred’s closet, so to speak, only to find nothing but a cardigan and a pair of canvas shoes.  When asked where Fred Rogers ends and “Mister Rogers” begins, Fred innocently fails to see the distinction.

Much hyped, BEAUTIFUL DAY is neither a “triumph” of modern moviemaking nor a “tour-de-force”.  If it has a weakness, it’s odd for a film about the most ground-breaking, inclusive children’s program of its time—brave enough to address racism—to neglect its female characters who haven’t much more than a line here and there.

Still, the film teaches on a personal level the lessons in empathy, kindness, and patience, that mattered most to the Presbyterian minister and father figure to us all.  When Lloyd first arrives on the set in Pittsburgh, Mister Rogers is deep in conversation with a terminally-ill boy.  Seventy-five minutes behind schedule, the line producer asks the producer, Bill Isler (Enrico Colantoni), to help wrap it up.  It’s unsurprising that Rogers does this every day.  What’s novel is that he willingly puts everyone else first.

Juxtaposing Fred’s calm manner with the parents’ frustration and—I’ll say it—embarrassment with their restless child, Hanks, Heller, and company, recapture the tirelessness and immovable patience of a man who wasn’t afraid to admit, even embrace, imperfection in himself as much as in others.  Failing to assemble a tent for a segment on the show, he doesn’t fume or curse.  He tries repeatedly, and when he just can’t put it together, he exclaims perhaps it’s a two-person job.  Watching the footage afterward, he insists on leaving the take as-is, “Children need to know that sometimes adults make plans that don’t always turn out the way we’d hoped.”

In fact, as expanded upon in Morgan Neville’s 2018 documentary, WON’T YOU BE MY NEIGHBOR, Rogers had his own challenges raising two sons—one who found his father’s enormous fame and reputation stifling, and another who struggled with adolescence. How do you cope, knowing that the rest of the world thinks of your father as theirs?  Respecting the Rogers’ privacy, the big-budget, Oscar-bait drama from Sony Pictures remarkably avoids manufacturing the very kind of controversy that made Lloyd’s career, instead leveraging the moment to humanize Rogers.

Interspersed throughout are fantastical sequences in the Land of Make Believe—a mythical realm led by King Friday and Lady Aberline (Maddie Corman), populated by various subjects including Daniel the Tiger.  As Tom Junod wrote in his Esquire article, Daniel (voiced by Fred, as with all of the puppets) was the embodiment of Rogers’ fears.  Lloyd echoes Junod’s piece about his own special friend, a rabbit given to him by his mother.

As a sort of therapist, reflecting back to us feelings we’re often too stoic to confront, Rogers helps Lloyd to realize the rabbit embodies the anger and resentment to which he clings on his mother’s behalf.  His mother is gone.  The harm to her no longer present, Lloyd’s emotions overwhelm and destroy him from the inside.

As Lloyd notes, Mister Rogers Neighborhood tackled themes other children’s programs avoided.  It was the first program that showed me, an Indian-American growing up in North Dakota, that I was far from alone in my brown skin.  Rogers’ boundless curiosity led the series down paths we adults, strangely, find too daunting to tread, including death.  Here Hanks pulls off a magic trick so astonishing it would leave Houdini speechless.  Suffering a mental breakdown, completely overwhelmed, Fred takes Lloyd to a noodle bar.  He asks Lloyd to pause and reflect for one minute.  Then the magic happens: An entire theater full of 400 people, all grown adults, sit silently in their chairs for an entire sixty seconds!  No cell phones.  No pens.  Not a whisper.

As Mister Rogers explained at least once or twice on his television program, when frustrated he’d give himself a minute to breathe and clear his mind.  Sometimes adults need a “time out” as much as children do, but we’re uptight and self-conscious, so we call it “meditation”.

Ophelia, if she could talk, would call it everyday magic.

“Anything human is mentionable.  Anything mentionable is manageable.”