A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood explores the life of Fred Rogers, known to generations
of TV viewers as host of the long-running Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.
But it's not exactly accurate.
Here are all the times A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood lied to you.
Probably the biggest factual fallacy in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood concerns
journalist Lloyd Vogel, played by Matthew Rhys.
There is no such person.
The film is based on a 1998 Esquire article called "Can You Say...Hero?," by Tom Junod
. Screenwriters exaggerated or straight-up invented so many character and story elements
that Junod asked the makers of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood to give the character
based on him a different name.
For example, the filmmakers exaggerated the character's initial nastiness.
In the film, Vogel's editor assigns him a profile on Mister Rogers to challenge him
to be a little softer because he's so tough on his subjects.
"I'm profiling Mr. Rogers."
"Oh, God, Lloyd, please.
Don't ruin my childhood."
Junod, it would seem, was never such a dark-minded "gotcha" guy.
Junod wrote in The Atlantic:
"I was assigned the story about Fred because one of the editors at Esquire thought it would
be amusing to have me, with my stated determination to 'say the unsayable,' write about the nicest
man in the world."
While it boasts an enchanting backdrop of an attempt to understand the inscrutably good-hearted
Fred Rogers, played by Tom Hanks, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is really a movie
about daddy issues.
As the film starts, Vogel has just welcomed a newborn baby boy with his wife, Andrea.
Vogel bristles just a bit at being a family man, and soon viewers discover why: He hates
his father because he cheated on Lloyd's dying mother, then abandoned the family.
Lloyd has a discomfort over being a father himself.
Rogers soon helps him forgive and reconcile with his dying father before it's too late.
This doesn't imitate the reality of Tom Junod.
When he met Rogers, his wife, Janet, had not just given birth to a baby boy.
The couple was childless, and it was Junod's conversations with Rogers that helped him
believe in himself enough to fully pursue the adoption of a baby daughter.
Likewise, Junod's real father, Lou, only resembled the movie character in the broadest sense.
Junod was never estranged from his dad, though they did have some bumps in their relationship:
"My father was a complicated guy.
And not all, not everything that he taught was really valuable to me, or really even
good for me."
Junod clarified one particular detail in The Atlantic, writing:
"I did not get into a fistfight with my father at my sister's wedding.
My sister didn't have a wedding."
One of the more powerful moments of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood occurs when Fred Rogers
goes to visit Lloyd's father, Jerry, as the man lies dying.
It shows the tumultuous relationship between father and son thawing, and it also demonstrates
the kindness and selflessness of Mister Rogers.
While the emotional resonance may be real, Rogers never visited Lou Junod on his deathbed.
But there's a line from this scene that is seeded in fact.
Rogers asks Jerry to pray for him, and when Jerry asks why, Rogers says,
"Someone who is suffering that much must be very close to God."
This is more or less what the real Rogers once told to a young boy he once met that
was coping with cerebral palsy, an event that Rogers recalls to Tom Junod in the Esquire
article on which this movie was based.
A major turning point comes when Lloyd sits in a restaurant interviewing Fred Rogers.
Mister Rogers implores Lloyd to take a reflective moment of silence, 10 seconds, actually, "to
think of the people who have loved us into being."
This is a moment that Rogers made happen, and even in public, but it didn't occur in
the context in which it was presented in the film.
In 1997, Rogers was presented a lifetime achievement award at the 1997 Daytime Emmy Awards.
After thanking the assembled throng of TV industry professionals, most of whom had risen
to their feet in thunderous applause of their beloved colleague, Rogers called for a moment
of quiet.
He said:
"All of us have special ones who have loved us into being.
Would you just take, along with me, 10 seconds to think of the people who have helped you
become who you are?"
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is not the life story of Mister Rogers.
It's more about the effect of his goodness and thoughtfulness on one man, and its target
audience of adults who grew up watching Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.
One such defining moment occurs when Lloyd Vogel attends a taping of a Mister Rogers'
Neighborhood episode.
Rogers tries to assemble a pup tent in the yard part of his soundstage home.
Try as he might, he can't get the thing to cooperate.
When asked if he wanted to try again with a new take, Rogers refused, saying that it
was important to show kids watching at home that sometimes things don't go as planned,
even for adults.
"Somebody said to me, 'Why don't you throw something on your program?' and, you know,
that would be more for them than for me."
Mister Rogers did fail to erect a tent on the set of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, but
he did it in 1975, more than 20 years before Tom Junod wrote the article upon which the
film is based.
For his unwavering commitment to kindness, goodness, and devotion to children, Fred Rogers
is something of a secular saint, worshiped like he's superhuman.
In the film, when Lloyd Vogel comments on Rogers' saintliness, his wife, Joanne Rogers,
gently chides him, saying that if people think of Rogers, quote, "as a saint, then his message
is unattainable."
She makes a good point about considering his humanity, perhaps Mister Rogers' secret point
all along, while also hinting at an aspect of Rogers’ life the film mostly overlooks.
Rogers was a devoutly religious man.
He was an ordained Presbyterian minister, and his Christian faith informed his personality,
on-screen persona, and the message of his show.
He was a secular saint with a secular TV show and a religious message.
It's kind of weird that the movie about him doesn't make more of a point of it.
"Jesus said to the people around him, 'Please, let the little children come up here.
I want to learn from them.'"
It's evident through the movie and the original Esquire article that the gentle TV character
of Mister Rogers is largely one and the same with the real Fred Rogers.
How gentle was the guy?
As Joanne Rogers tells Lloyd Vogel in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, he was loathe to
hurt animals.
The real-life Rogers adopted a vegetarian lifestyle back in the 1970s, when eschewing
meat was a radical, hippie kind of thing to do.
His quippy, affecting justification for not eating animals, as he says in the movie to
Vogel, is that he refused to, quote, "eat anything that has a mother."
The real Rogers was known to say this a lot when asked why he chose salad over steak,
but he never said it to journalist Tom Junod.
Or, if he did, Junod didn't quote Rogers saying it in the article.
Seems like he probably would have included it.
It's a great line.
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