Morgan Neville’s portrait of Fred Rogers is a tribute rather than an investigation, and it leans heavily on the archive. But the archive is remarkable, and we were more moved than we expected to be by a slow-talking man and a shy tiger puppet.
Fred Rogers was an ordained Presbyterian minister who went into television because he disliked it. From 1968 he made Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood for American public television, a programme in which a middle-aged man in a cardigan spoke slowly and directly to small children about feelings, and he kept making it for more than thirty years. Morgan Neville’s documentary sets out to show that the man was exactly what he appeared to be. It succeeds, and it does so mostly by playing the tapes.
The tapes are the film. Early on we see an episode from the week Robert Kennedy was shot, in which Rogers has a puppet ask what the word assassination means, and answers. We see him in 1969 before a Senate subcommittee that intends to cut public broadcasting’s funding, reciting the words of a song about what to do with anger, and we see the senator opposite him change his mind on camera. Jeff Malmberg and Aaron Wickenden cut these long. They let Rogers take his pauses, and the pauses are where he lived.
The film’s best idea is Daniel, the striped tiger. Rogers voiced him for the whole run, and Neville argues, with help from the people who worked on the programme, that the puppet was where Rogers put the parts of himself he could not say out loud: the anxious child, the overweight boy who was teased, the man who wondered late in life whether any of it had done any good. There is a clip in which Daniel asks whether he was a mistake. We did not expect to be undone by a hand puppet with a paw over its eyes, and we were. It is the smallness of the voice that does it, and the fact that nobody on screen hurries to reassure him.
Around the archive, Neville puts the usual talking heads, and Graham Willoughby shoots them plainly, in warm light against dark rooms. Joanne Rogers is dry and funny about her husband; Jim Rogers and John Rogers talk about what it was to have Mister Rogers as an actual father, which is the closest the film gets to a complaint. Tom Junod, the journalist who went to write a magazine profile and came out a friend, is the most articulate witness. Margaret Whitmer, David Newell and Joe Negri speak for the crew. Jonathan Kirkscey’s piano score stays close to the programme’s own music and never pushes. Everyone liked him. Nobody has an unkind word.
That is the point of the film and it is also the trouble with it. Neville raises the hard questions and then sets them down. The most quoted scene in the programme’s history, in which Rogers shares a paddling pool with a Black colleague on a hot day in 1969, is here, and it is as good as its reputation, but the film moves on before we learn much about how Rogers treated that colleague off camera. Late in life Rogers was blamed by some commentators for raising a generation to think itself special, and Neville dispatches them in a couple of minutes of clips and a shrug. Rogers’ own doubts, which the film clearly knows about, are stated once and not pressed. The animated interludes, in which a cartoon Daniel wanders through a grey city, are pretty and tell us nothing the puppet had not already told us.
Set against the run of recent celebrity documentaries, this is a modest, well-made one. It does not have the shape of Neville’s 20 Feet from Stardom, where the interviews carried the argument; here the interviews confirm what the clips have shown. At 95 minutes it is short, and the last decade of Rogers’ life goes by quickly, in a manner we will not describe.
The programme was never really shown here, and most British viewers will come to it knowing Rogers, if at all, as an American joke about niceness. The film does not need you to have watched a single episode. It needs you to sit still for a man who talked slowly and meant every word, which is a harder ask than it sounds. Certificate 12A, and we would let the children stay.
