Marielle Heller (2019)
Fred Rogers (1928-2003) – puppeteer, presenter, musician and moral inspiration – is a legendary name in the annals of American television. His half-hour show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, aimed primarily at a pre-school audience, ran for more than thirty years and almost nine hundred episodes. The show did more than entertain. According to Wikipedia, it:
’emphasized the child’s developing psyche, feelings, sense of moral and ethical reasoning, civility, tolerance, sharing, and self-worth. Difficult topics such as the death of a family pet, sibling rivalry, the addition of a newborn into families, moving and enrolling in a new school, and divorce were also addressed.’
Rogers, and his reputation for calm, kind, reassuring advice to children and their parents, became a national institution. British audiences, though, are unlikely to be familiar with him – unless they’ve seen last year’s Morgan Neville documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor? Watching Tom Hanks as Rogers in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is rather like watching Meryl Streep as Julia Child in Nora Ephron’s Julie and Julia (2009). You’re impressed by the performance but you can’t see it, as an American viewer can, in relation to prolonged personal experience of the widely loved original. (That must still be the case even if you check out YouTube clips beforehand.)
The two films have something else in common. The American TV icon isn’t the main role in terms of screen time. Ephron told Julia Child’s story in parallel to that of Julie Powell (Amy Adams), who set out to cook every one of the hundreds of recipes in Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking and wrote a highly successful blog about the project. The protagonist in A Beautiful Day is the journalist Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys), assigned to profile Fred Rogers for Esquire magazine. One definite advantage of this set-up over Julie and Julia’s is that the two principals interact – indeed, their interaction is the heart of Marielle Heller’s movie. The problem is, it stops being distinctive whenever Hanks isn’t on screen – interest flags, as it did in the Childless sections of Julie and Julia. That was hardly Amy Adams’s fault and Matthew Rhys plays the journalist well but, in Hanks’s absence, suspension of cynicism on the viewer’s part goes out the window. We know too well that A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, although based on true events, is going to be a clichéd Hollywood story of healing – of how a bitter, self-centred man, through the influence of Mister Rogers, becomes a considerate, compassionate one.
The screenplay, by Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster, is based on an article, first published in Esquire in 1998, entitled ‘Can You Say … Hero?’[1] and written by Tom Junod, the inspiration for Lloyd Vogel. According to Junod’s Wikipedia entry, he ‘is the recipient of two National Magazine Awards …, the most prestigious award in magazine writing’. The first time Lloyd appears in the film, he’s giving an acceptance speech after winning a National Magazine Award. Also according to Wikipedia, Junod has said that his encounter with Rogers ‘changed his perspective on life’. But Lloyd, however much in common he may have with a real individual, is a generic character. He has a wife, Andrea (Susan Kelechi Watson), and they have a baby daughter but driven Lloyd is, in effect, married to his work – and driven largely because of unresolved parent issues. He’s never stopped blaming his father Jerry (Chris Cooper) for the way he treated Lloyd’s late mother.
Using source material with a ‘can you?’ question in its title isn’t the only resemblance between Marielle Heller’s second and third features. The main theme of this new film is the very question that gave its immediate predecessor, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, its name. Heller makes clear from the start, in the first of several simulations of Fred Rogers’s TV show, that her story will be a parable about forgiveness. Tom Hanks comes through a door in the studio set and makes himself at home. He takes off his jacket and outdoor shoes, and puts on the host’s trademark red cardigan and sneakers (complete with collar and tie, and light-coloured casual trousers). Smiling to camera, he quietly introduces the topic of forgiving and Lloyd Vogel, whose face is revealed behind one of the windows on his picture board. Heller’s effective opening not only states her theme but situates it within the TV world of Fred Rogers – a world that’s both an artificial creation and yet, it seems, an expression of its creator’s authentic values.
Lloyd has been estranged from his father for years. The old resentment flares up again at the wedding of Lloyd’s sister Lorraine (Tammy Blanchard), culminating in a fist fight involving Lloyd, Jerry and Lorraine’s latest new husband (played by the film’s co-writer Noah Harpster). Lloyd’s hostility to Jerry intensifies when his father, in spite of what happened at the wedding, persists in trying to mend fences with him. At the same time, Lloyd is commissioned by his editor Ellen (Christine Lahti) to write a short profile of Fred Rogers, one of a series of ‘American hero’ pieces that Esquire is running. Mister Rogers isn’t acerbic Lloyd’s cup of tea. He’s reluctant to take the job on until Ellen informs him that Rogers was the only one of Esquire’s prospective subjects willing to be grilled by him, the other heroes on the list all put off by Lloyd’s fearsome reputation. When he gets round to doing the interviews, Lloyd is disturbed to find himself being asked, rather than asking, difficult questions. He may have hoped to dent Fred’s too-good-to-be-true public reputation. Instead, Lloyd’s on the receiving end of an infinitely benign psychotherapist.
The casting of Tom Hanks seems boringly obvious but works very well. Hanks’s own nice-guy persona, on screen and off, enriches the riddle of how Fred Rogers can possibly be for real. Ordained as a Presbyterian minister in his mid-thirties and subsequently enrolled in the University of Pittsburgh’s child development graduate studies programme, he and his wife Joanne were married for more than fifty years and had two sons. According to Tom Junod’s profile, Rogers went swimming nearly every morning of his life. He seems to have been a prime example of mens sana in corpore sano. While his worldview was shaped and sustained by Christian faith, he exudes, in Tom Hanks’s interpretation, a Zen-like calm. Hanks’s small eyes and smile give him the look of a (trim) Buddha: he makes Rogers almost spookily inscrutable. Although he doesn’t closely mimic Rogers’s voice (I have looked at YouTube clips, since seeing the film), you always have the sense that he’s doing an impersonation. At the same time, you admire the integrity of Hanks’s engagement with the character – and his seemingly easy mastery of screen acting. He realises quite brilliantly here someone performing to camera but who, in doing so, is not pretending. Watching Tom Hanks act can be greatly reassuring: like Fred Rogers’s young audience, you feel you’re in very safe hands.
Matthew Rhys is very good at showing how his character is both frustrated and impressed by Fred’s unfathomable, acute decency but the writing of Lloyd is simplistic and unfair. (The other roles are even thinner.) When Lloyd and Fred are on a subway train together, all their fellow passengers, regardless of age, start up a chorus of the TV show’s ‘It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood’ song. The sequence has impact, all right, but it’s an excessive illustration of Lloyd’s isolation from the human race. It’s a long time before he’s given the chance even to explain why he hates his father so much. When Lloyd eventually speaks his mind, the consequences are immediate and tritely melodramatic. Jerry promptly collapses and is confined to bed for the rest of his time on screen. He dies surrounded by his whole, loving family, Lloyd included; the group is joined by Fred, who makes a surprise call. By this point, even the appearance of Tom Hanks can’t conceal that the film has dwindled to a tame set of tropes and requirements.
In the cultural and political climate of America today, this happy-ending story of making peace with sworn enemies, with the figure of Fred Rogers at its centre, is bound to give rise to yearning and nostalgia (all the stronger if Rogers was part of your actual childhood). Marielle Heller sometimes does a good job of avoiding sentimental pitfalls. Fred and his wife (Maryann Plunkett) regularly play the piano together. He tells Lloyd that he occasionally feels the need, to release the tensions inside him, to bang down hard on the low notes. Heller does well to have Fred briefly pounding a piano before he exits the studio at the end of the film. The whole is unsatisfying, though, because the screenplay just isn’t good enough. Heller’s was the twelfth and last film that I saw at the 2019 London Film Festival. I enjoyed several of them, including this one, but nothing came close to my Festival highlights of each of the three previous years – Manchester by the Sea (2016), 120 BPM (2017) and Roma (2018). In nearly all cases, the main weakness of this year’s offerings was the screenplay. As I came out of the Embankment Garden Cinema after seeing A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, I couldn’t help thinking of Alfred Hitchcock’s dictum that ‘To make a great film you need three things – the script, the script, and the script’.
13 October 2019
[1] https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a27134/can-you-say-hero-esq1198/
