Morgan Neville (2018)
Morgan Neville’s latest journey into late-twentieth-century Americana is an exploration of the children’s TV icon Fred Rogers’s life and work, and the beliefs underpinning them. Twenty Feet from Stardom (2013) was a survey of the unsung singers who did backing for assorted pop and rock stars over several decades. Gore Vidal and William F Buckley Jr, the title characters of Best of Enemies (2015), were antagonists in the American culture wars that raged in the late 1960s and beyond. The historical context of Neville’s films suggests that their subjects are close not only to their maker’s heart but also to his childhood experiences. That’s particularly the case with Won’t You Be My Neighbor? Neville was born in October 1967 in California. Misterogers’ Neighborhood (as it was originally called), broadcast in its earliest days in northeastern states only, aired nationwide for the first time in February 1968.
It’s as well I watched Marielle Heller’s A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood before I caught up with Neville’s documentary. Heller’s dramatised account of Fred Rogers’s influence on lives, though it’s enjoyable, is constrained by an unimaginative script. Much of the interest in the movie came from discovering the character of Rogers. If I’d been better informed about that, through having seen Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, I’d think even less of A Beautiful Day. Watching the real man over the course of a documentary feature confirms how well Tom Hanks, in spite of very different facial features, captures Rogers’s quiet intentness. Otherwise, Neville’s film exposes the weakness of Heller’s. Although the latter is based on the journalist Tom Junod’s real-life encounter with Rogers, the tale of redemption told in A Beautiful Day is very familiar screen drama. It’s a formula leavened by adding the magic Mister Rogers ingredient but a formula for all that.
Neville’s formal approach isn’t radical either. He combines news film, extracts from Mister Rogers shows, archive interviews with the man himself, and talking heads – including Rogers’s widow, sons and sister, members of the TV show cast and crew, Tom Junod (who bears a striking resemblance to Joaquin Phoenix) and various friends of Rogers, among them the cellist Yo-Yo Ma. At first, you wonder how the narrative is going to develop. The unfailingly modest and benign Rogers keeps saying nice things to and about people. People keep saying nice things about him. Neville gradually complicates and enriches the profile, though. He roots the hero’s extraordinary ability to communicate with young children in Rogers’s own formative years as well as in his academic background in child development. He illustrates Rogers’s singular effectiveness as a public speaker, notably before a US Senate committee on the funding of PBS in 1969, and evidences his readiness to grapple with difficult subjects by juxtaposing relevant examples of his show with news footage of national tragedies – Robert Kennedy’s assassination, the Space Shuttle Challenger accident – which his young audience would also be seeing on television. The final edition of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood aired on the last day of August 2001. The host’s retirement was short-lived: Rogers was asked to do a TV piece in the light of 9/11, when words nearly failed even him.
Neville isn’t above the odd bit of prurient probing. Rogers, a byword for wholesomeness, was also decidedly non-macho. He had what could be described as a feminine gentleness. His clothes were unpretentious but he was impeccably groomed. I assume that Neville asks whether he might have been secretly gay to answer a question that’s been raised elsewhere in the American media. The answer, from François Clemmons – who played Officer Clemmons on Mister Rogers for twenty-five years, did belatedly emerge from the closet and is a firm believer in gaydar – is no. When word got back to him that Clemmons had been seen in a gay club, Rogers told his colleague he’d have to leave the show if he came out publicly, so Clemmons delayed doing so. Far from bearing Rogers any ill will, he came to see him as the loving father he’d never had. Joanne Rogers, as hard to dislike as her late husband, stresses that he was never homophobic (some-of-their-best-friends-were-gay) – it was just culturally a bit too soon to broadcast Officer Clemmons’ sexuality.
On a show aired in mid-1969, Mister Rogers cooled off by putting his feet in a bowl of water and invited African-American Officer Clemmons to join him. At a time when apartheid was still going strong in American swimming pools (as archive film inserted at this point makes disgustingly clear), the sketch was interpretable as a political statement. Fred Rogers, a lifelong Republican, emerges from Won’t You Be My Neighbor? as an interesting mixture of conservative and radical values, and Neville makes clear his capacity, at least in his later years, to stir up hostility among politically opposed groups. By the time he died in 2003, Rogers was sufficiently LGBT-friendly for placard-bearing homophobes to mount a street demonstration, making the case that Mr Nice Guy wasn’t nice after all.
We hear contrasting voices blaming ‘that evil, evil man’ for creating a generation of the entitled – the result, they claim, of Mister Rogers assuring each one of his child viewers of their ‘specialness’. The view of these detractors, dim-witted as it is, does touch on a crucial aspect of Rogers’s approach. One of his best-known quotes is that ‘Everyone longs to be loved … the greatest thing we can do is to let people know that they are loved and capable of loving’ – a statement based in his religious faith, in the idea that every human being is a unique creation infinitely loved by its creator. Rogers saw it as important to promote on television what he saw as Christian values of love and compassion but he seems to have done so without explicit reference to Christian dogma, enabling those so inclined to confuse individual ‘specialness’ with egotism.
I’m reluctant to agree with Armond White but he wasn’t wrong to complain in National Review that Marielle Heller and the screenwriters of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood showed insufficient interest in the ‘religious origins’ of Rogers’s ‘remedies’ – ‘the movie seems wary of faith … and settles for secular sentimentality to account for his sensibility and behavior’. Perhaps Heller would justify this on the basis of Rogers’s own determined reticence on camera about the particular credal foundation of his philosophy. Morgan Neville has fewer qualms about giving Christianity its due. The conclusion to Won’t You Be My Neighbor? has an eccentric humour characteristic of his documentary as a whole, and of the man it celebrates. Joanne Rogers recalls her husband was determined to die well and, throughout his final illness, kept up his Bible-reading. This included the separation of sheep from goats at the Last Judgment. Very near the end, he asked Joanne, ‘Am I a sheep?’ ‘Fred, if anyone is a sheep, you are’, his wife replied.
15 January 2020
