Tom Hanks Plays Santa for Broken Grownups

If Tom Hanks fails to create a real, flesh-and-blood person out of his performance as Fred Rogers, it’s perhaps a testament to the aura of divinity that continues to surround the children’s television star. “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” which ran first on NBC and then on PBS from 1968 to 2001, was the unique vision of the puppeteer and Presbyterian minister. In his neckties and zip-up cardigans, Rogers demonstrated both mundane wonders — the postal service, magnets, going to the dentist — and, with a clear-eyed delicacy, navigated for his young audience the darker moments that pierced everyday life in the latter half of the 20th century: the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, racial segregation and even nuclear war. The context was always an emotional one, in keeping with Rogers’ central mission to give his viewers the tools to grapple with the internal complexity of childhood.

“A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” in which Hanks stars, only interrogates the pure-heartedness of its subject in subtle ways, like Maryann Plunkett as Joanne Rogers bristling at the description of her husband as “a saint.” As if his remarkable kindness was unobtainable for the rest of us. Hanks too, in recent years, has taken on an untouchable halo of paternal benevolence, perceived as both an emblem of a simpler time in Hollywood and possibly the last nice man working within its system. Director Marielle Heller seems knowingly to blend these personas, Hanks, Rogers, Rogers, Hanks, for maximum effect. Her film’s Mister Rogers doesn’t need to be exposed as flawed. He just needs to be genuinely able to help the emotionally fractured childhood of Lloyd Vogel. Except that Lloyd is not a child. He’s an investigative journalist for Esquire Magazine played by Matthew Rhys.

Based on the events surrounding an actual 1998 Esquire profile by journalist Tom Junod, “Neighborhood” is really Lloyd’s story. As he attempts to pin down the hidden ugliness of Rogers, the ugliness of his own life rushes to the surface. His public attorney wife (Susan Kelechi Watson) has been left domestically stranded with their newborn. His estranged, philandering father (Chris Cooper) is crudely attempting to make amends. Most of all, the memory of watching his mother die still hangs over him, leaving him too frightened to take up the emotional support of being a parent himself. It is only through Rogers’ unyielding compassion, turning the interview on the interviewer, that Lloyd’s childhood is mended enough that he can start to build a nurturing childhood for his son.

Hardly any children appear in the film, and it is not one intended for children. Instead, it posits, what if all the patience and tenderness reserved for helping a child through a difficult time were given, with equal measure, to an adult slowly suffocating in his own isolation, anger and resentment?

How much you will enjoy that journey may largely depend on how much therapy you’re already attending — your weekly hour may not need an additional 2 hours sitting in the theater — and how much you enjoyed George Seaton’s “Miracle on 34th Street.” Marielle Heller, who deserved a spot on last year’s Best Director ticket for her poignantly bitter “Can You Ever Forgive Me?”, is perhaps an initially odd choice for capturing both the soft twinkle of Rogers, as well as what turns out to be the true adult Christmas film this year. But it’s her comfort in the ordinary gloom of living that keeps the sugar from spilling over. Every location, from Port Authority to a New York hospital to a cheap wedding banquet, is crafted as if descriptors like “drab” and “a vaguely nauseating place no one wants to be” were as rewarding to create as “technicolor” or “a sumptuous delight.” The puke grays are soul-crushing, the dingy blacks enveloping, the gross orange glow of a city streetlight is just that. It all serves to make Hanks’ performance all the more magical, slightly out of place and almost luminescent. 

Whether you can believe it — could anyone be so kind? Could one writer’s experience with Mister Rogers in the late ’90s have so thoroughly changed his life? — is not so unlike whether you can believe the real Santa Claus took over at the Macy’s flagship store in 1947. In the movies, at Christmas, of course you can. 

“A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” is playing widely.