Re: A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood reviews
Posted: Sun Dec 22, 2019 7:49 pm
I had a better reaction than Sabin did. I give a lot of points to the surreal elements: they made it clear the movie was going after something different from a profile of Mr. Rogers, or even a naturalistic story about a psychically-damaged journalist he helps. This movie was trying to capture some essence of what Mr. Rogers means to some people, and the toll that takes on the man himself. I wouldn't say the movie is fully successful, but I admired its ambition.
The film's biggest failure is probably the Matthew Rhys part of it -- not all the details, but definitely the resolution, which borders on banal. I went back and read the Esquire piece on which this was based, and found that many of the anecdotes in the film are documented -- including, it stunned me to learn, the subway encounter -- but that all the stuff regarding Rhys' character was fictional. Maybe this is why it rings less true than the rest.
But I thought the film made up for it by taking a fascinating approach to Mr. Rogers. I noted, when I talked about Won't You Be My Neighbor?, that I'd never watched the man on TV. People who loved the documentary kept telling me how impressed they were by just now nice Rogers was. The urban skeptic in me, though, couldn't respond to that -- I kept wondering, what's the catch? This movie, I think, is made for people like me. It sees what Rogers is doing, and doesn't deny that he seems to accomplish a great deal of good. But it wonders about him: why is he doing this? He seems to have something close to a priesthood, but one wonders, why, and what toll does it take on him?
The fascination of Hanks' performance is, it keeps the man pretty opaque. His Rogers is ever-amiable, but not exactly warm. He's evasive whenever asked about himself. He directs everything outward -- his ubiquitous picture-taking never includes one with him in the frame (though you'd think the people involved would love the celebrity shot). And his final moment in the film suggests all his good works do, in fact, drain him quite drastically. I found myself thinking of another Hanks movie, The Green Mile, and how the Michael Clarke Duncan character sucked all the poison out of others and drew it into himself. This behavior, in a non-fictional character, does border on saintly -- but it also contains a hint of pathology. I thought the movie let us see both, and that made for a far more interesting portrait than the documentary delivered.
It's not a top-film-of-the-year contender, but Hanks' performance would deserve a slot, and I'd go for the screenplay, as well, despite its shortcomings in the Rhys segments.
The film's biggest failure is probably the Matthew Rhys part of it -- not all the details, but definitely the resolution, which borders on banal. I went back and read the Esquire piece on which this was based, and found that many of the anecdotes in the film are documented -- including, it stunned me to learn, the subway encounter -- but that all the stuff regarding Rhys' character was fictional. Maybe this is why it rings less true than the rest.
But I thought the film made up for it by taking a fascinating approach to Mr. Rogers. I noted, when I talked about Won't You Be My Neighbor?, that I'd never watched the man on TV. People who loved the documentary kept telling me how impressed they were by just now nice Rogers was. The urban skeptic in me, though, couldn't respond to that -- I kept wondering, what's the catch? This movie, I think, is made for people like me. It sees what Rogers is doing, and doesn't deny that he seems to accomplish a great deal of good. But it wonders about him: why is he doing this? He seems to have something close to a priesthood, but one wonders, why, and what toll does it take on him?
The fascination of Hanks' performance is, it keeps the man pretty opaque. His Rogers is ever-amiable, but not exactly warm. He's evasive whenever asked about himself. He directs everything outward -- his ubiquitous picture-taking never includes one with him in the frame (though you'd think the people involved would love the celebrity shot). And his final moment in the film suggests all his good works do, in fact, drain him quite drastically. I found myself thinking of another Hanks movie, The Green Mile, and how the Michael Clarke Duncan character sucked all the poison out of others and drew it into himself. This behavior, in a non-fictional character, does border on saintly -- but it also contains a hint of pathology. I thought the movie let us see both, and that made for a far more interesting portrait than the documentary delivered.
It's not a top-film-of-the-year contender, but Hanks' performance would deserve a slot, and I'd go for the screenplay, as well, despite its shortcomings in the Rhys segments.