Heller frames a magazine writer’s crisis as an episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and the trick is warmer and stranger than it sounds. Tom Hanks is patient and exact; the story he is being patient with is the familiar one about a son and his father.
Marielle Heller’s film is not a biopic of Fred Rogers, and it says so in its first minute. It opens as an episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood: the model street, the front door, the cardigan, Tom Hanks changing his shoes and telling us about a friend of his called Lloyd who has a hurt on his face. Lloyd is the subject. Rogers is the weather. That decision keeps the film from being the one you were dreading, and it also hands the film its main weakness, because Lloyd’s story is the ordinary one. We liked it, warmly and with reservations, for most of its 109 minutes.
Hanks does not do an impression. His voice is lower and slower than Rogers’s own, and he never tries to vanish inside the part. What he gets right is the pace. This Rogers listens as if there were no clock in the building, and pauses before answering as if the question had earned it. When Lloyd asks him something sharp at the studio, Rogers asks about Lloyd’s father instead, and Hanks makes the deflection look like attention. He also lets us see that goodness of this sort is work: there are admissions, later, about temper and about how he manages it, and Hanks plays them as facts rather than confessions.
Matthew Rhys has the harder job. Lloyd is a man who wrote a piece so unkind that no one will talk to him, and Rhys plays him without asking for our sympathy: shoulders up, jaw set, the bruise from his sister’s wedding worn like a badge. Chris Cooper’s Jerry is the drunk father who turns up with a new partner, Dorothy (Wendy Makkena), and wants to be forgiven before he has asked. Susan Kelechi Watson gives Andrea more weight than the script does; the marriage feels lived in, and her fondness for Rogers is the film’s first joke and its steadiest argument.
The craft is where Heller’s playfulness shows. Jade Healy’s team built the film’s cities as models, so that when Lloyd flies to Pittsburgh a toy aeroplane crosses a painted sky and lands beside a miniature of the studio, and the real world arrives with the same wooden houses the programme used. Jody Lee Lipes shoots the Neighborhood scenes soft and flat, so they look like the old show, and shoots the rest in cooler, plainer light, so you always know which world you are in. Nate Heller’s score is mostly piano, and quiet, and it knows when to stop. Arjun Bhasin’s costumes do a good deal of the characterisation: Rogers in his cardigans and Lloyd in jackets that look slept in.
The scene everyone talks about is in a diner. Rogers asks Lloyd to take one minute to think about the people who loved him into being, and the film then holds that minute. Anne McCabe does not cut away to fill it. Hanks looks into the lens; the other diners fall silent; there is no music. We sat there and did as we were told, and we were caught out. It was not sentiment that did it, because there was none on offer; it was being asked, directly, and finding we had an answer. That minute is what separates this film from the tidy thing it might have been.
The rest is tidier. Once Lloyd’s family troubles come to a head, the script by Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster moves through them in the order you would expect, and the last half hour is slower and softer than the first. A dream sequence in which Lloyd shrinks to the size of one of the puppets and finds himself on the set has nerve, and we admired the nerve, but it tells us nothing we had not already gathered. Enrico Colantoni’s Bill Isler and Carmen Cusack’s Margy Whitmer, running the studio around Rogers, are sketched in a few lines and deserved more.
Heller’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl and Can You Ever Forgive Me? were about people who were hard to like, and she did not soften them. This film has a hard man too, but it wants him mended, and it mends him. That is the difference between a good film and the ones she made before it, and it is not a small difference.
It is a PG. Watch it at home, where you can do the minute without anyone seeing you.
