A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

Tom Hanks, as Fred Rogers

It was the trolley. It had to be the trolley.

I loved trains. My first attempt to draw something, when I was not quite 4 years old, was an attempt to draw a train near an overhead bridge in my hometown. When we'd go to my grandparents' house in Connecticut, my grandfather would take me to the giant train station in Stamford just so we could watch the trains come and go. During holiday season, we'd go to the FAO Schwarz store at the Short Hills Mall, and I'd watch the model trains go through impossibly large displays.

So, when the new TV show came on, the one with a trolley going to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, I was hooked. "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" was my show. I watched, alone, on the 19-inch black and white Zenith in our den room, and watched for that trolley. Sometimes I'd call him "Mr. Ogers," because the graphic used the same 'r' for the end of "Mister" and the beginning of "Rogers."

I learned some things from that show. Not big things, or at least they didn't seem big at the time. Little things. Lots of little things. Mr. Rogers always looked at his guests eye-to-eye, no matter their age or anything else about them. If there was one lesson I wanted to take from his show when I became a parent, that was my lesson. "I like you just the way you are" is a challenge worth taking.



This brings me to "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood," the new movie starring Tom Hanks as Mr. Rogers, inspired by a 1998 profile in "Esquire" magazine by Tom Junod entitled, "Can You Say... Hero?" The movie opens with... the trolley!!! And the insistent piano music. I was immediately 6 years old again. We see Mr. Rogers enter his TV house, change in to his more comfortable clothes as he always did, and then... and then there's a plot.

The movie has a 95 rating from Rotten Tomatoes, so lots of critics seem to like it.

I didn't.


Mr. Rogers visits a local fire station
Many of the Mr. Rogers vignettes were lifted more or less directly from Junod's wonderful article, so they're essentially accurate. But the plot is ridiculous. It's contrived redemption arc fare, with generic backdrop items such as family drama, a baby, a fight, a mixed-race marriage, an alcoholic dying dad, a wedding, and a death. Mr. Rogers gets the hero role to enable the salvation of the fictionalized writer (played by Matthew Rhys).

Won't You Be My Neighbor, from 2018

Hanks gets the mannerisms as well as any mere mortal can, and repeatedly says the modest Fred Rogers lines denying any claim to human saintliness. Nonetheless, the movie Mr. Rogers never makes a significant mistake. Even when he seems to make a mistake, such as failing in an attempt to assemble a tent, it's not really a mistake; after all, kids need to see that adults fail, too. It's all about grace, and we might as well beatify Fred Rogers now.

Many  little touches are nice, including use of model airplanes, and presenting an explanation of how magazines are made, in the style that the TV show used. But they're not enough, for me, to save the film. Stay, though, for the closing credits. Stay for that.

In the late '90's, around the time of the Esquire article, Aaron was becoming old enough to understand his world. I was surprised, and somewhat thrilled, to discover that "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" was still airing on our local public television station. A typical episode included Mr. Rogers visiting a local fire station, where the the firehouse Captain explained the equipment and the job. And, we saw the trolley. I came to appreciate the craft of the show from a whole new perspective. We watched every new episode we could.

If you want to understand what made Mr. Rogers so magic, check out the far superior 2018 documentary "Won't You Be My Neighbor?", which both humanizes Mr. Rogers and places him on context. Or, go to www.misterrogers.org/, and watch a few episodes.