The first trailer dropped recently for A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, the biographical drama starring Tom Hanks that focuses on the late-life of actor and entertainer Fred Rogers, who was the host of beloved children’s program Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. The movie was revealed to be in the works late last year, and upon seeing this new trailer I thought the same thing that I thought when I heard they were making A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood; why are they making another Mr. Rogers movie so soon, especially when the first one was so good?
Won’t You Be My Neighbor?
For those of you who aren’t familiar with what I’m getting at, I am of course referring to the excellent documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor? which came out in select theaters last year. It was directed by Morgan Neville and went over the entire life of Fred Rogers and his philosophy through testimony provided by his co-workers, friends, and family as well as clips directly from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. The film is currently the highest-grossing biographical documentary of all time and was met with glowing praise from critics upon release, currently holding a 98% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
While I cannot say that A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood looks bad by any stretch, especially not based on just this one trailer we’ve seen, it’s existence alone puzzles and somewhat saddens me. It feels as though they had an excellent movie right there with Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, but they felt that they couldn’t sell the story to a wider audience without making it into a standard, at least somewhat fictionalized and dramatized movie.
Allow me to give a brief review of Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, as it is an excellent film, and one I believe every one of you should watch as soon as possible. The film largely discusses two major points, those being what Fred Rogers was like as a person, and how he tried to do good and reach people through his television show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Everything from the way that the show was structured, to how Rogers felt about other media aimed at children, and most importantly, how he spoke to children and tried to communicate serious and mature themes without talking down to them.
Mr. Rogers does not come out of this movie looking like anything but a wonderful, sweet, truly kind person who believed in good and wanted everybody to feel loved and able to love. But the other thing he comes out looking like is a complicated, often sad person. A person who struggled with many fears and depressions as a child, and who wanted to teach other children how they could handle things like he did. There’s a great sadness to how real his kindness was, and how at times he reaped no happiness from it, unsure if he was truly making a difference in a rapidly growing and changing society.
The depth to which Won’t You Be My Neighbor? explores Fred Rogers as a person is shaking and beautiful, and I would not be surprised if by the end it has you soaked with tears. I cried harder at my first viewing of Won’t You Ne My Neighbor? than I ever have at any other film. Hell, I teared up pretty hard just re-watching the trailer that I used for this article. It’s an emotional rollercoaster, and it all feels real and earned. My ultimate point is very simple and it’s this; Won’t You Be My Neighbor? is a fantastic movie about Mister Rogers and it only came out last year, so why are we getting another movie about Mister Rogers so soon?
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
Just to reiterate, my impressions of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood are far from negative based on the trailer that we’ve been given. Honestly, I think that the movie looks kind of good. But again, the story that it’s presenting seems like a superfluous retelling of what we already saw in Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, but with a much more narrow focus and the film-making strewn through the filter of Hollywood whimsy, even if just a bit.
Documentaries are very different in structure and film-making from standard films in a variety of ways, but the first way in which they differ is that there is not always a main character to follow. In Won’t You Be My Neighbor? the closest thing to a main character is Fred Rogers himself, who only appears in the film through clips taken before his death in 2003. He is, and by extension, his philosophy is the main focus of the film’s narrative and the closest thing we have to a main character, while the supporting cast of interviewers are what holds up everything around the core of him as they all express their opinions on everything he did in his life. This offers a wide variety of opinionated perspectives – though mostly in favor of Rogers, I will admit – that the audience can sort through and come to their own conclusion based off of. That doesn’t appear to be the case in the much more simply structured A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.
By contrast, Fred Rogers is played in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood by Tom Hanks, who while a great performer, and possibly the best actor to play Fred Rogers later in his life, is still not actually Fred Rogers, and therefor loses the purity of emotion and character that the real Rogers carries with him in the documentary. Additionally, Fred Rogers isn’t the central protagonist of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood’s, but rather a fictional journalist named Lloyd Vogel, who is made to profile Fred in a story about “heroes” for his job. The character is based on an article written in 1998 by Tom Junod titled Can You Say… Hero?. It appears as though the tension in the film will be derived from us fearing if there will be some dark secret or misconception uncovered by Lloyd that makes us doubt the kindness and purity that we associate with Mr. Rogers. The big problem with that approach is two-fold.
Firstly, Won’t You Be My Neighbor? was very kind to the memory of Fred Rogers, but it was also unbiased in its approach to exploring his insecurities and rare failures that he did have, it just so happens he wasn’t hiding anything incriminating. So the audience didn’t need somebody to be made up in order for us to see what kind of man he was, because he himself, as well as friends and family, did it for us in the film. The second big problem with creating tension in this story is that, quite simply, Mr. Rogers was very, very nice.
There were tensions that surrounded Fred Rogers towards the end of his life, with news organizations and certain groups calling him an enabler of laziness and entitlement in a generation, for convincing people they were “special”, but that rhetoric was debunked by Rogers himself, and also had little to do with his own actions. I just can’t see the point in creating a fictionalized character to explore the soul of a real person like Fred Rogers when his actions already speak for themselves, especially when we already know how kind he really was.
At the end of the day, I’d personally just much rather watch the more authentic, down-to-Earth version of Fred Rogers’ story, rather than something that’s been fabricated to any degree by studio executives. I am not calling this new movie a soulless Hollywood cash-grab, because it really does not seem like one, but it certainly feels to me like them making a simplified version of something already fantastic just so it can appeal to a wider demographic. That being said, I really still am willing to give A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood a chance, because I’m sure the people behind it mean well and want to tell the best story they can tell, and it could still turn out to be a good movie. Knowing my own tastes and based off of what we’ve seen so far, however, I’ll probably still end up liking Won’t You Be My Neighbor? more in the end.
I recommend that everybody reading this who is interested in seeing A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood goes out and watches Won’t You Be My Neighbor? first. Both films may have a fair amount of heart behind them, but you may find that one of them just has a little bit more than the other.
