The revelation of Morgan Neville’s wonderful 2018 documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor? was that, away from the camera, Fred “Mister” Rogers really was that guy. An ordained Presbyterian minister who kept doctrine well out of his TV show, he endeavored to make every boy and girl feel loved, his bugaboo not Satan but a child’s harsh self-judgment and its attendant despair or cynicism. The hook of the fictionalized Fred Rogers story A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is what happens when Mister Rogers (played by Tom Hanks) comes face-to-face with a hardened cynic, an Esquire journalist named Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys) who’s on assignment for a profile he didn’t ask for and doesn’t want to do. Lloyd doesn’t believe in benevolent patriarchs—not since his father (Chris Cooper) abandoned the family when Lloyd’s mother got sick. He’s an angry, angry man, hardly able to be present with his wife, Andrea (Susan Kelechi Watson), and baby son or to maintain eye contact with his beatific magazine subject. But Mister Rogers can smell despair. It falls to this Magic Christian to give Lloyd a safe space to show his vulnerability, gently but firmly ushering the journalist into his “neighborhood” with its ratty puppets and choo-choo train. Can you say “Forgive Daddy”?
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