☆☆☆☆
As much as anyone, I suppose I'm something of an expert on Mister Rogers, not be virtue of having children but of having been one at just the time when Mister Rogers' Neighborhood was at the height of its popularity and influence.
It's a funny thing, because both as a pre-schooler watching the show and as a middle-aged adult watching the new documentary Won't You Be My Neighbor?, it seems impossible to place Mister Rogers in time. He is ageless both as a character and as a concept, and his gentle tones and simple pace make it as likely his shows were produced yesterday as 50 years ago, and his messages seem as uncannily simple and unnervingly topical today as they did back then.
Mister Rogers helped children wonder why the world was difficult, and to marvel at its complexity and beauty, even while recognizing that it wasn't always easy to get through each and every day. Even for a 3-year-old, Fred Rogers innately understood, some days just suck. So do some people. And it is okay not to like them.
Funny thing about Mister Rogers: In his own way, he told it exactly as it was, and one of the more surprising revelations in Won't You Be My Neighbor is that one of the key reasons both the show and the man endure wasn't because of his intrinsic kindness or fabled exhortation that "you are special," but because of anger.
"What do you do with the mad that you feel?" was the question a little boy asked Fred Rogers early on, and became the centerpiece of Rogers' Congressional testimony that helped save the Public Broadcasting System, which President Richard M. Nixon had wanted to eliminate.
What, indeed, did people in mid- to late-1960s do with the mad they felt, with the anger that fumed and seethed, with the fear and distrust that seemed to be everywhere, the senseless murders and the horrible never-ending wars? Mister Rogers didn't try to answer the questions of the day -- he went straight for the questions of the heart, and it turned out a lot of young children were confused by the world around them. Mister Rogers helped set them right.
How he did that is not an easy thing to explain, but Won't You Be My Neighbor? makes a valiant effort. This small-but-potent documentary digs in deeper than expected into Fred Rogers, touching on everything from his own unhappy childhood to his perfectionist ways. It proceeds from the assumption that Fred Rogers was a real man -- not merely a celebrity who had a public persona, but a man with the rare ability to define and project who he was at heart and communicate it through the medium of television.
Throughout a bevy of talking-head interviews and a wonderful range of clips that range from the 1950s to the early 2000s, it becomes clear that the man who smiled at children and asked them questions with no easy answers, who taught them how to be kind even while allowing them anger and dissatisfaction, was exactly who he appeared to be, a man who believed in the goodness of people.
The interviews are insightful and marvelous, the insight into the series is a delight, but the real reason to see Won't You Be My Neighbor even if you didn't grow up watching Mister Rogers' Neighborhood comes a little more than halfway through the film, when the story of Fred Rogers, after a remarkable television career that cemented him as an American icon, moves in an unexpected direction.
A middle-aged man who has worked at the same job for most of his life, Rogers finds himself in a shockingly familiar dilemma: He wants to do something different, but fears he doesn't have the skills to do anything other than what he's always done. He stopped producing Mister Rogers' Neighborhood and started producing a series for adults called Old Friends ... New Friends, and it failed. He went back to the Neighborhood, and there's a sense that he was frustrated by his detour. His wife, Joanne, the most insightful of the warm and interesting interview subjects, shares a letter Fred Rogers wrote to himself, expressing deep doubts about his abilities, fear of the future.
What's that? Mister Rogers, afraid? Mister Rogers, unsure? Mister Rogers having an existential crisis? But it happened, and more than once it seems -- the sort of detail that makes Won't You Be My Neighbor feel braver, less cautious than mere hagiography.
This isn't a gossipy film. It genuinely wants to explore the phenomenon of Fred Rogers, and provides honest and penetrating efforts to look at the man himself, and consider why he seemed to know so much about what kids want, how they feel -- the answer might seem like a "spoiler alert," though it's not: Fred Rogers had an unusual ability to recall his very own childhood, his personal fears and sadnesses, and to know that what he felt was not out of the ordinary for any young child.
What Won't You Be My Neighbor? director Morgan Neville, in turn, understands is that viewers of the film by and large will remember their own interactions with Mister Rogers through the TV set; they remember the deep feelings that Mister Rogers tapped -- feelings of being odd, being lonely, being dumb, being scared, being creative, being different. The documentary does a masterful job at simultaneously evoking the feelings through clips and, through great commentary, examining why Rogers was so successful at addressing them.
It's a deeply affecting film, one that stirs powerful emotions of childhood, and asks some hard questions (which it doesn't directly answer) about the banality of kids' TV programming, the intense consumerism foisted upon kids at an early age, and about violence and dissatisfaction with the world and how that's portrayed on TV -- how our kids are growing up hearing those messages.
So, maybe the ultimate point to Won't You Be My Neighbor? is that Mister Rogers never hurt anyone. His TV was about personal discovery and personal growth, it was about being a better person. And the second point the film makes, less directly but with no less power -- it's both satisfying and entirely appropriate to see the film become this -- is about what we've become today in a post-Rogers world.
Won't You Be My Neighbor? doesn't shy away from the right-wing conservative allegations that Mister Rogers' belief in the moral and emotional development of children has led, in their minds, at least, to a slacker millennial generation. For some, Rogers is a lightning rod, Exhibit A in their theory that young people have grown up without a backbone.
The irony to that argument is that it's the middle-aged TV commentators themselves -- the successful, allegedly well-adjusted ones -- who grew up at the height of Rogers, not the 20- and 30-somethings they are mocking. The arguments and attacks ring hollow here, but it's to the film's credit that they are presented.
His self-proclaimed mission was to teach the world about the need for kindness, for inclusion, for tolerance, for love -- genuine, humanitarian love, for every single person. Increasing numbers of conservatives (and remember, Rogers was a Republican) have seized on a gross perversion of one of Rogers' most famous messages: "You are special." It never meant you're a delicate snowflake; it meant that Mister Rogers likes you just the way you are, and exactly as you were made, with all of your gifts and your shortcomings. I like you because you are on this planet with me and we are all people.
It's so alarmingly simple a message -- espoused by a quiet, meek Republican -- that it sounds downright radical and vaguely leftist today. And though Won't You Be My Neighbor doesn't jump into the current political fracas in any direct way, it's hard not to walk away from this film wondering what Mister Rogers would have made of our sharply divided, eternally quarreling nation and the egomaniac who "leads" us.
It's impossible to sit through Won't You Be My Neighbor? and not wonder what Mister Rogers would be telling us to make of it all, dispensing advice for getting through this never-ending unhappiness and sense of unfairness.
Then again, if Mr. Rogers really were still around, we probably would never have gotten into this whole mess in the first place.
Arclight Sherman Oaks -- 2115
Viewed July 6, 2018
It's a funny thing, because both as a pre-schooler watching the show and as a middle-aged adult watching the new documentary Won't You Be My Neighbor?, it seems impossible to place Mister Rogers in time. He is ageless both as a character and as a concept, and his gentle tones and simple pace make it as likely his shows were produced yesterday as 50 years ago, and his messages seem as uncannily simple and unnervingly topical today as they did back then.
Mister Rogers helped children wonder why the world was difficult, and to marvel at its complexity and beauty, even while recognizing that it wasn't always easy to get through each and every day. Even for a 3-year-old, Fred Rogers innately understood, some days just suck. So do some people. And it is okay not to like them.
Funny thing about Mister Rogers: In his own way, he told it exactly as it was, and one of the more surprising revelations in Won't You Be My Neighbor is that one of the key reasons both the show and the man endure wasn't because of his intrinsic kindness or fabled exhortation that "you are special," but because of anger.
"What do you do with the mad that you feel?" was the question a little boy asked Fred Rogers early on, and became the centerpiece of Rogers' Congressional testimony that helped save the Public Broadcasting System, which President Richard M. Nixon had wanted to eliminate.
What, indeed, did people in mid- to late-1960s do with the mad they felt, with the anger that fumed and seethed, with the fear and distrust that seemed to be everywhere, the senseless murders and the horrible never-ending wars? Mister Rogers didn't try to answer the questions of the day -- he went straight for the questions of the heart, and it turned out a lot of young children were confused by the world around them. Mister Rogers helped set them right.
How he did that is not an easy thing to explain, but Won't You Be My Neighbor? makes a valiant effort. This small-but-potent documentary digs in deeper than expected into Fred Rogers, touching on everything from his own unhappy childhood to his perfectionist ways. It proceeds from the assumption that Fred Rogers was a real man -- not merely a celebrity who had a public persona, but a man with the rare ability to define and project who he was at heart and communicate it through the medium of television.
Throughout a bevy of talking-head interviews and a wonderful range of clips that range from the 1950s to the early 2000s, it becomes clear that the man who smiled at children and asked them questions with no easy answers, who taught them how to be kind even while allowing them anger and dissatisfaction, was exactly who he appeared to be, a man who believed in the goodness of people.
The interviews are insightful and marvelous, the insight into the series is a delight, but the real reason to see Won't You Be My Neighbor even if you didn't grow up watching Mister Rogers' Neighborhood comes a little more than halfway through the film, when the story of Fred Rogers, after a remarkable television career that cemented him as an American icon, moves in an unexpected direction.
A middle-aged man who has worked at the same job for most of his life, Rogers finds himself in a shockingly familiar dilemma: He wants to do something different, but fears he doesn't have the skills to do anything other than what he's always done. He stopped producing Mister Rogers' Neighborhood and started producing a series for adults called Old Friends ... New Friends, and it failed. He went back to the Neighborhood, and there's a sense that he was frustrated by his detour. His wife, Joanne, the most insightful of the warm and interesting interview subjects, shares a letter Fred Rogers wrote to himself, expressing deep doubts about his abilities, fear of the future.
What's that? Mister Rogers, afraid? Mister Rogers, unsure? Mister Rogers having an existential crisis? But it happened, and more than once it seems -- the sort of detail that makes Won't You Be My Neighbor feel braver, less cautious than mere hagiography.
This isn't a gossipy film. It genuinely wants to explore the phenomenon of Fred Rogers, and provides honest and penetrating efforts to look at the man himself, and consider why he seemed to know so much about what kids want, how they feel -- the answer might seem like a "spoiler alert," though it's not: Fred Rogers had an unusual ability to recall his very own childhood, his personal fears and sadnesses, and to know that what he felt was not out of the ordinary for any young child.
What Won't You Be My Neighbor? director Morgan Neville, in turn, understands is that viewers of the film by and large will remember their own interactions with Mister Rogers through the TV set; they remember the deep feelings that Mister Rogers tapped -- feelings of being odd, being lonely, being dumb, being scared, being creative, being different. The documentary does a masterful job at simultaneously evoking the feelings through clips and, through great commentary, examining why Rogers was so successful at addressing them.
It's a deeply affecting film, one that stirs powerful emotions of childhood, and asks some hard questions (which it doesn't directly answer) about the banality of kids' TV programming, the intense consumerism foisted upon kids at an early age, and about violence and dissatisfaction with the world and how that's portrayed on TV -- how our kids are growing up hearing those messages.
So, maybe the ultimate point to Won't You Be My Neighbor? is that Mister Rogers never hurt anyone. His TV was about personal discovery and personal growth, it was about being a better person. And the second point the film makes, less directly but with no less power -- it's both satisfying and entirely appropriate to see the film become this -- is about what we've become today in a post-Rogers world.
Won't You Be My Neighbor? doesn't shy away from the right-wing conservative allegations that Mister Rogers' belief in the moral and emotional development of children has led, in their minds, at least, to a slacker millennial generation. For some, Rogers is a lightning rod, Exhibit A in their theory that young people have grown up without a backbone.
The irony to that argument is that it's the middle-aged TV commentators themselves -- the successful, allegedly well-adjusted ones -- who grew up at the height of Rogers, not the 20- and 30-somethings they are mocking. The arguments and attacks ring hollow here, but it's to the film's credit that they are presented.
His self-proclaimed mission was to teach the world about the need for kindness, for inclusion, for tolerance, for love -- genuine, humanitarian love, for every single person. Increasing numbers of conservatives (and remember, Rogers was a Republican) have seized on a gross perversion of one of Rogers' most famous messages: "You are special." It never meant you're a delicate snowflake; it meant that Mister Rogers likes you just the way you are, and exactly as you were made, with all of your gifts and your shortcomings. I like you because you are on this planet with me and we are all people.
It's so alarmingly simple a message -- espoused by a quiet, meek Republican -- that it sounds downright radical and vaguely leftist today. And though Won't You Be My Neighbor doesn't jump into the current political fracas in any direct way, it's hard not to walk away from this film wondering what Mister Rogers would have made of our sharply divided, eternally quarreling nation and the egomaniac who "leads" us.
It's impossible to sit through Won't You Be My Neighbor? and not wonder what Mister Rogers would be telling us to make of it all, dispensing advice for getting through this never-ending unhappiness and sense of unfairness.
Then again, if Mr. Rogers really were still around, we probably would never have gotten into this whole mess in the first place.
Arclight Sherman Oaks -- 2115
Viewed July 6, 2018
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