Fred and Tom

More than one reviewer has said that Tom Hanks in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is “absolutely perfect as Mr. Rogers,” or words to that effect. Granted that’s the sort of thing that will get your review quoted by film marketers, but I (and I am not, of course, a movie reviewer) have to wonder which characteristics of Fred Rogers Tom Hanks captures “perfect”ly.
     Or maybe the idea is that the Mr. R. portrayed by Tom Hanks is perfect. He sure tries to be. He is a very tense person, always striving, never really relaxed, always looking after the personal growth of people, including himself.
     When the real Mr. R. talked to children, they listened because he was relaxed, not like the worried and distracted other adults around them. His grin — look at it! — was achievable only by a relaxed person, though I will allow for Fred’s use of the actor’s art. Tom’s portrayal of that grin is very tense, strained even, as if his Fred has quite a lot of inner stuff getting in the way of the grin. Part of the problem may be differing facial structures or something like that. I notice that the real Mr. R. grin includes open eyes, whereas Tom’s portrayal of it is usually squinting, but that may be a Tomism more than a choice in how to portray Fred. And Tom is downright jerky, so that, for instance, the shoe-flip is overdone and stagey in comparison with the real thing.
    But the main thing, and maybe this goes hand-in-glove with the tension, is that Tom’s Mr. R. talks to and with adults. That’s whose personal growth he’s after. That is a choice of which story to tell, and the movie’s (“inspired by a true . . .”) story about a magazine writer is worth seeing and may well be a true and good story about Fred Rogers as well. But it is not a story about Mr. Rogers, who talked to and with children, which hardly happens in the movie. Some of the audience might feel cheated that the movie does not tell that other story, but it doesn’t intend to.
     One thing the movie captures about Mr. Rogers / Fred Rogers (for they are the same person in this), at least as he has seemed to me, is his relentless commitment to and involvement in ministry, the “always” in his concern for human personal growth. It recalls Luke’s statement that Paul was “possessed by the Word” (Acts 18:5). The most important thing about Fred for some of the people I go to church with is probably his objectionable theology, if they know about it. He was a liberal Presbyterian clergyman, and evangelicals sweat such details — to a large extent because Presbyterians expended so much energy in the twentieth century fighting and refighting and dividing and subdividing over those issues. That is, I believe, more the sort of issue that people will take into final judgment (sort of like the “Lord, Lord!” ministers in Matthew 7) than what God will ask about. Fred’s ministry is not that easily discredited.

• Mr. Rogers, like many of my favorite dead people, has a website.