A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD (2019)

A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD (2019)

This movie is based on the real life friendship between Mr. Rogers (played by Tom Hanks) and Lloyd Vogel (played by Matthew Rhys). Lloyd gets asked to do a 400 word write up on heroes and his assignment is Mr. Rodgers. The ordeal ends up turning into much more than that as Lloyd gets to know Fred Rodgers and a friendship starts to develop.

First off let me say that I am not a huge Tom Hanks fan at all. Having said that, I don’t let those types of things get in the way of what I think of individual performances and Hanks nails it as Mr. Rogers. In fact I couldn’t come up with a more perfect person for the role. If they made a new Mr. Rogers show, I would say give it to Hanks right now. Aside from that, Susan Kelechi Watson’s (This Is Us) performance as Andrea Vogel, probably stood out the most to me. She did an amazing job portraying the struggles of being the wife of a writer who is gone on assignment all the time who is also dealing with some anger issues and inner pain. All this while having a very young child to take care of. Aside from Mr. Rogers, she is actually the real glue that holds this movie together, being both strong and supportive at the same time. Speaking of great performances, Maryann Plunkett also does a great job in the short amount of screen time she gets as Joanne Rogers.

My only critique of the movie is that it contains what I call a few “BIRDMAN moments” where you can’t really tell where the director was going in exchanges between fantasy and reality. There are no real cuts in certain scenes, and that causes some unnecessary, “what is going on?” moments where there really didn’t need to be. I am all for new and innovative directorial decisions but the ones in this movie fall flat.

What this movie does extremely well is point out that there is genuine kindness in the world and it did not shy away from the fact that Mr. Rogers both read the Bible daily and prayed for people by name. In today’s Hollywood, I am actually kinda of shocked that the makers of this movie didn’t cut that scene. That spoke volumes to me, because you rarely ever see that in secular films anymore. There are also some real tear-jerking scenes in this that go to the heart of forgiveness and redemption. 

For those reasons and Hanks fantastic portrayal of an American icon, I have to give A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood a solid 6 out of 7 in spite of some wonky presentation decisions. 

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