A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019)

(Amazon Streaming, December 2020) I understand why the world makes us cynics (I’m Gen-X; while we didn’t invent cynicism, we’re pretty good at it,) but it’s not a bad idea once in a while to stop and ask ourselves if there’s another way. I had limited exposure to Fred Rogers in my youth, but discovering him as an adult may be an even bigger revelation – his incredibly earnest, vulnerable approach to the human condition is enough to make anyone wonder – is this guy for real? Is it even possible to be this uncynical, or does it hide something else? This turns out to be one of the key pieces of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, a Rogers biopic that has to navigate a tricky path between describing Rogers, not falling prey to easy contrarianism and trying not to repeat the 2018 documentary Won’t You be My Neighbour? too much. Structurally, the film avoids making Rogers the protagonist, and instead follows the adventure of a journalist who thinks of himself as too cool for Rogers – only for Rogers to become the antagonist, the one breaking down the main character and rebuilding him for the better. Tom Hanks is an almost perfect fit for playing Rogers: With the weight of his filmography as a nice guy and a generally irreproachable personal life, Hanks roughly occupies a similar cultural space as Rogers. Director Marielle Heller has a few tricks up her sleeve here – presenting a film that struggles with the possibility that Roger may, in fact, exactly be what he appears to be despite an almost-childish desire to find otherwise (with a few darker sequences to shock viewers); and borrowing a few powerful moments from the documentary within a narrative structure. It’s all quite impressive: the film’s tough armour is gradually whittled away until a state of guilelessness is achieved, and the impact is quite something. Maybe the carapace we carry can be taken off from time to time.