Tropic Sprockets / A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

By Ian Brockway

In the late 1990s, the irreverent writer Tom Junod met Fred Rogers for a profile in Esquire magazine. Rogers, the children’s TV host was fascinated by Junod as a “bad boy” journalist. In this new screen adaptation of the published article, the famed man senses that Junod is putting up barriers and Rogers wants to help him. Observing the writer’s bruised nose, Rogers asks “what happened?”

The journalist brushes it off as a baseball injury but after Mister Rogers presses Junod says, “I had a fight…with my father.” The film “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” by the inimitable Marielle Heller (Diary of A Teenage Girl) is the story of this friendship.

Here Junod is Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys), a troubled, emotionally reserved man who detests his father (Chris Cooper) for his unfaithfulness regarding his mother on her deathbed. Rogers keeps pressing and Vogel reveals more than he thinks he should. 

As Mister Rogers, Tom Hanks is spot on and stellar. Rogers’ voice: calm, steady and measured yet with a rising inflection that is sincerely interested. It is all there.

Vogel is being hounded by his careless irresponsible father and going to pieces. When he gets the assignment to profile Mister Rogers, he doesn’t know what to expect, but the writer is taken aback. Rogers’ calmness must be hiding something, surely he is not that nice.

But..he is.

Rogers saw TV as an intimate sacred space where he could talk to children about ideas, giving them tools to viscerally experience life in whatever situation that they happened to be. This empathy made Rogers able to pick up on Vogel’s frigidity and break through much like a psychiatrist. 

At first Vogel wants none of it.

Though Vogel is intriguing, the most compelling enigma of all is Fred Rogers, who has the eerie ability to see through people he meets. Oddly, rather than something frightening or off putting, it is comforting. In one great scene, Rogers says “Do an exercise for me, take a minute to think about all of the people who loved you into existence.” 

The exercise works.

Rogers is ritualistic and routine oriented. His toy-like construction of “The Neighborhood” can be thought of as an insulation against the chaos of life where all is confusion and noise. Rogers slows life down, making it not only tranquil, but digestible and reflective.

Consequently, this cardigan-clad man became the most beloved in TV history, a parallel to actor Tom Hanks. There is a touching scene where the entire train composed of kids and adults sing the theme song to Mister Rogers. The tone of this scene curiously recalls “Churchill.” Both Churchill and Rogers were beloved but the latter has the modesty, and Hanks plays it flawlessly with tremendous warmth.

At one point the film slides close to melodrama. Vogel comes home to find his father laughing with his wife (Susan Kaleechi Watson) over pizza. Vogel goes ballistic causing Dad to collapse. Though this feels at first to be emotionally over the top, the film switches to a Twilight Zone atmosphere that recalls that series’ episode “Mirror Image.” Vogel sees Mister Rogers everywhere he goes, from the hospital to the bus station. This demonstrates the facile skill of Heller in offering a mixture in tone, of not taking the conventional biopic path.

The quiet, steady-gaited, WASPish looking man is always two steps ahead of Vogel, a tiger cat puppet in his back pack. 

Also interesting is the concept of the child within the adult. This was very important to Rogers. He believed every adult contained a child and to access this was to bring about peace and happiness. Vogel becomes a mature father through this awareness, just about saving his marriage.

As said, the most arresting mystery is Mister Rogers himself. “I was chased and called fat Freddie when I was ten…I cried…but there are many ways to deal with anger…maybe you swim as fast as you can or maybe you play the lowest notes on the piano… (and he mimics striking the piano) DRUM!”

Vogel asks Rogers more. He responds, “What do you think about that?”

The writer relents. 

But the question of Rogers’ tranquility remains.

At the film’s end, after a long day Fred Rogers retires to the piano. He starts a soothing tune, but then the lights go dim. Rogers pounds on the low scale of the piano—-DRUM! Darkness surrounds the beloved man and Fred Rogers remains a cypher.

But for most of us, it is more important to remember Fred Rogers as a gentle trailblazer, nourishing a generation with expansive ideas and creating a giddy mindfulness that we are all unique just as we are.

Write Ian at [email protected]

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