A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019, Marielle Heller) (Patreon)

46/100

Never wrote anything about Won't You Be My Neighbor?—mostly because it was released during the pre-Patreon stretch when I was playing poker all day every day, but also partly because my lukewarm reaction (rating: 50) boiled down to "Cynical curmudgeon who found Mr. Rogers cloying even as a small child, reporting for duty." So I identified perhaps a bit too strongly with Rhys' protagonist here, and never stopped resisting the film's strenuous efforts to penetrate my armor. The opening sequence did grab my attention, at least once I got past how little Hanks resembles the man he's channeling; introducing Junod (sorry, "Lloyd Vogel") as a moral lesson on the TV show makes for shrewd comedy, and I was having a swell time for as long as Rogers observed this uptight dude's life from afar, pausing for Nymph()maniac-style digressions (I happened to rewatch Vol. I the previous day) about how glossy magazines are produced. Eventually, however, the two must meet, at which point Beautiful Day turned ugly for me. Or extremely annoying, anyway, because Fred Rogers becomes Vogel's pro bono therapist, providing inquisitive empathy whether Vogel wants it or not while largely refusing to cooperate with Vogel's assignment. Granted, this is his nightmare every bit as much as it's mine, and the movie deserves some credit (which I do give—otherwise you'd be looking at a rating closer to 26) for creatively positioning this near-saintly public figure as an antagonist of sorts. But of course we're ultimately meant to embrace Rogers' worldview, and I remain an emotionally constipated weirdo who thinks you should leave people the fuck alone when they make it clear that they're not comfortable sharing their deepest feelings with you, a total (if famous) stranger. (On the other hand, I totally identify with the notion of turning a 400-word puff piece about a celebrity into a 10,000-word essay that's primarily about yourself.) Also, the psychological wound that Rogers helps Vogel to bandage is just too banal (more daddy issues! big year for those), though I did appreciate some of the finer details, e.g. Jerry's second wife struggling to be supportive without overstepping her bounds. More interesting than I'd expected, but still, decidedly not for me. And Hanks had better not win a third Oscar just for barely passable mimicry.