I haven't seen a lot of movies lately that impressed me. I don't think I even wrote here about Hustlers. But last evening, a friend and I watched a "screener" DVD of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood and if I were the kind of person who reviewed movies on a thumbs up/thumbs down basis, mine would be pointing towards the ceiling. I didn't expect to like it as much as I did.
As I've written before here, I rarely "buy" impersonation movies where someone is playing a public figure I know so well. The impression may be as good as it could possibly be — the leads in Stan & Ollie being a recent example — but the fact that it's an impersonation rarely leaves my frontal lobes. Tom Hanks did an "as good as it could possibly be" impression in A Beautiful Day… but it was like a mad scientist kidnapped Hanks and Fred Rogers, locked them into chairs in his secret lab and used some impossible machine to fuse the two into one body. There was still a little too much of Tom Hanks in there for me.
Maybe, you might think as I briefly did, if they'd cast an unknown as Mister Rogers…but then, if that person's unknown, he probably isn't anywhere near as good an actor as Tom Hanks. And for reasons we can all understand, maybe the movie wouldn't have been made or gotten much attention without Tom Hanks in it. So my brain decided to play along and once I'd made that mental leap, I had a good time. As I wrote back here expressing my advance reservations about this film, I met the real Mister Rogers once and Hanks managed to capture exactly the guy I met.
He was aided a lot by the fine screenplay by Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster, spinning off the 1998 Esquire article "Can You Say…Hero?" by Tom Junod. Between those three men there was a real understanding of Fred Rogers, both onscreen and off. And of course, as everyone familiar with him in both modes has noted, one of the charming things about Mister Rogers is that there really wasn't any difference between the two.
In case you haven't seen the film or heard much about it, this is not so much a film about Fred Rogers as it is about a mythical reporter (based a bit on Tom Junod) who met Fred Rogers and had his life changed as a result. The reporter is well-played by Matthew Rhys and though you kind of see where the transformation's going about ten minutes into the picture, it's quite enjoyable watching it happen. If you get a chance, watch it happen.