A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019) starts with a journalist. Lloyd Vogel is known for angry profiles, and the magazine gives him a small assignment: four hundred words on Fred Rogers for an issue about heroes. Rogers has been making a children's programme for thirty years. During the interview it becomes unclear who is asking the questions. Its best decision is not putting Rogers at the centre. This is not a biopic; he is a supporting character, and the story belongs to a man estranged from his father. The source is Tom Junod's piece Can You Say... Hero?, published in Esquire in 1998. Junod really did interview Rogers and the two remained friends until Rogers died. The journalist in the film is drawn from him, but the name and the family history are invented. Marielle Heller directed. Tom Hanks plays Rogers and Matthew Rhys the journalist. Hanks was nominated for Best Supporting Actor. Its formal trick is that the story is told as an episode of Rogers's television programme. Cities are shown as models, a model aeroplane hangs in the air, and New York is built like a studio set. The most discussed moment happens in a restaurant. Rogers asks the man across from him to spend one minute thinking about the people who helped him, and the film genuinely waits out that minute in silence. It runs 109 minutes. Good for: quiet drama, Tom Hanks, and stories about forgiveness. Less good for: it is slow and deliberately uneventful. Rogers's own life and difficulties get almost no space. The journalist's family story follows a familiar template.