A beautiful day in Rogers’ neighborhood
Print Edition
SO accustomed are we to the downfall and disgrace of men that a marvelous sense of its absence propels the rich and glowing documentary “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”
Fifty years after he made his public TV debut, Fred Rogers remains aloft: a pure and gentle soul never befallen by scandal, a still-shining beacon of kindness without the near-requisite dark shadow.
The film, directed by Morgan Neville, uses behind-the-scenes footage from “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” archival video of Rogers and copious talking-head interviews with his collaborators and family members, including his wife Joanne and their two sons.
As unique as “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” was in its own TV era, Rogers would seem downright extraterrestrial on today’s cable menu. Not long after Neville plays a snippet of Fox News where pundits bemoan Rogers for coddling a generation by teaching them that everyone is special, a former worker on “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” wonders if there’s room today “for a nice person on TV.”
Calling forth Rogers today is both a reminder of the mammoth loss (he died in 2003) and how sadly bereft we are of anything like him. Many of the battles Rogers was fighting — against the “ever-ready molders” of children, against mass entertainment made without compassion — are simply no longer waged. Rogers came from outside Pittsburgh and was often an ill child (Rogers had scarlet fever) who was bullied for being overweight. Rogers was left, as he says, “to make up a lot of my own fun.”
The hand puppet Daniel Striped Tiger would eventually become a kind of outlet for Rogers’ own fears and anxieties. But he also emerged from his youth with a profound sensitivity.
The documentary opens with a home-video clip of Rogers sitting at a piano in 1967 (a year before “Neighborhood” debuted nationwide) describing how he’d like to “help children through the difficult modulations of life.”
“Love is at the root of everything,” he says later. “Love or the lack of love.”
With these simple beliefs — love yourself, love your neighbor — Rogers made a quietly revolutionary show. He spoke about divorce, tackled racism, spoke frankly, without condescension, about traumatic events.
The documentary ultimately doesn’t dig much into who Rogers was. He remains unknowable for all his sincerity.
One of his sons notes how it was “a little tough for me to have almost the second Christ as my dad.”
Neville instead leaves us Rogers’ simple and earnest message, and a final note of reflection on the people who shape our lives. Or as the song goes: “Won’t you be mine, could you be mine?”
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