A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

Grade: B+

Director Marielle Heller’s film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood was a La La Land type situation for me. On January 1, 2017, I was all ready to see a lighthearted, breezy rom-com movie musical. I enjoyed what I saw, but it was markedly different from what I thought I signed up for. If you go into A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood expecting a straight-up Fred Rogers biopic, you are in for a surprise. Rogers is a supporting character (and indeed, Tom Hanks – who plays him – is nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar), and the primary character is a journalist being given an assignment to do a short interview with Mr. Rogers. He is sarcastic and cynical, with some major repressed and undealt-with feelings, and he feels the project is beneath him. It is an unconventional kind of biopic if you can even call it one. The same can be said about Marielle Heller’s previous film, Can You Ever Forgive Me?

You can’t compare ABDITN to Won’t You Be My Neighbor, and vice versa. The latter is a straightforward documentary, and the former is more of a movie-movie, so it’s more entertaining and closer to fiction. This can be a dark ride. The opening scene is deliciously disturbing. It made me think of Oliver Stone, particularly the parts in Natural Born Killers that play a character’s rough childhood in the style of a 1950’s sitcom. An abusive father, played by Rodney Dangerfield, says some pretty horrific things, all punctuated by a studio audience laugh track. While not quite that extreme, this first scene amazed me that the movie “goes there,” and does so right off the bat. There’s also a surreal dream sequence that seems to come from David Lynch territory. I didn’t know where reality ended and the dream began.

The title is a misquote, and probably intentional. Rogers actually sings “it’s a beautiful day in THIS neighborhood,” and never used the film’s namesake in the song at all. It’s a product of the Mandela Effect. Enough people sang it with the wrong words, that it stuck – much like “it’s the day of the show, y’all.” That’s not the line. Tom Hanks, most of the time, does not resemble Fred Rogers that much, but he is an ideal choice to play him. He nails it from the acting standpoint, and off-screen, has always had the same warm approachable feel as Rogers. The movie makes maximum use of his tendency to speak slowly and simply, and it is not shy about having tense, uncomfortable silences, where it’s so quiet, you can hear people swallowing, and the clock tick. Matthew Rhys, as the journalist, is an actor I don’t remember seeing before, but he does an admirable job of playing a character I spent most of the movie not liking much. Chris Cooper, Christine Lahti, and Susan Kelechi Watson (from This Is Us) all turn in effective performances. At first, I thought them making this film would be redundant so soon after the release of Won’t You Be My Neighbor, but each takes its own path. If you are a mature viewer who likes a creatively told, bittersweet story and doesn’t mind a little darkness, this could be a beautiful day in this – or any – neighborhood.

Grade: B+