A Beautiful day in the neighborhood

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood isn’t a groundbreaking film, nor is it truly a biopic or even a real award contender come Oscar time. It’s none of that, however, it is, whether we know it or not a film that we needed.

This is not the origin story of the late Fred Rodgers and although his own on-camera persona may come off as fiction he genuinely is who he is, a person that cares about the world, its youth and our neighbors around us.

In our current era of scandals, #metoo, where a lot of larger than life media personalities and cultural heroes turned out to be hiding who they really were, Mr. Rodgers and his positive message to kids dealing with confusing t

Yet, as we get in to it with this film, investigative journalist Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys) isn’t all that convinced. Vogel is a hot-tempered almost misanthropic reporter, who’s extremely good at his job, discovering the lies and faults of his subjects but has an abrasive personality and a reputation of burning his interviewees.

As his company, Esquire, decides to lighten up the next issues content with it’s American heroes pieces, he’s required to travel from his home in New York to Pittsburg to profile the children’s programing icon. A job he’s less than thrilled to do as he questions his editor “why me?” she replies that Mr. Rodgers was the only one that agreed to be interviewed by him.

Vogel has a troubling past that’s rooted in deep anger toward his own father who we find out abandoned him, his sister and mother when they were at their lowest point. Having just had a newborn kid himself, there’s worry that he’ll make the same mistakes his father made now that he has his own child, however, he doesn’t divulge much, often keeping that anger built inside.

Vogel is skeptical of Mr. Rodgers, even asking him to ‘tell him the difference from his stage persona and who the real Fred Rodgers is,’ which appears to be insulting to Mr. Rodgers although he says nothing of the kind.

The true beauty of casting Tom Hanks as the title role is how amazing he is as an actor and how much he can convey with a simple look and a smile because within that look he’s telling the audience “I know you’re trying to provoke me but I see the good and the longing for help in you anyway.”

You feel yourself as the kids on the NY subway, singing the introduction song to the show when they see Mr. Rodgers boarding it, the people on the street hoping to shake his hand…. You see yourself as Vogel too because we’re him. We’re not broken… just in need of some love and self-healing.

To say Fred Rodgers was a saint or psychologist would be diminishing who he was. Despite being a Presbyterian minister he never invoked God or faith into his show nor did he speak in pseudo-psychological terms. He just talked and explored those troubling feeling just so you knew it was okay to feel that way and that by dealing with these troubling emotions the better you’d eventually feel and get.

This is not the story of Mr. Rodgers and this is not the story of Lloyd Vogel.

This is the story of us, the story of our issues, our anger, hurt, in the busy world that we live in today. It’s a story to remind us of the good in people and in ourselves and that emotional pain is a self-inflicted feeling that can be dealt with through talking it out, whether that be with the person we’re angry with, a loved one or your friendly local neighbor.