The new documentary about Fred Rogers is an actual sleeper hit, in that its profundity will lie in wait and hit you in waves hours after leaving the theater. After it’s enveloped you for 94 minutes in archival footage from his 40 years of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, interviews with a wildly theorizing young Rogers and then the wizened turn-of-the-millennium TV veteran, and original testimony from friends and family who allay the inevitable doubt and then some: Yes, they all say, he really was that way in real life.
His tender teaching of every child’s self-worth—“You’ve made this day a special day by just being you,” Rogers tells us from the screen, “There’s no person in the whole world like you, and I like you just the way you are”—applies to adults, too. Viewers will be forgiven for tearing up at the twinkling intro to the show’s theme song, and the hopeful invitation, “Won’t you be mine?” (The weekday matinee I went to was stocked with criers.) Reviews of Oscar-winning documentarian Morgan Neville’s Won’t You Be My Neighbor? rarely miss the contextual contrast that casts the tender spirit of Rogers’ show as a balm for our bitter and angry age. Neville sets us up to see this. It’s hard to imagine Fred Rogers, who died in 2003, would have minded a timely new spin on his life’s work. His presence, in select theaters, succors weary hearts while the national news ratchets up our nightmares. And this, Neville reminds us, isn’t a new role for Rogers.
In one late-1960s episode, he shared a backyard foot-bath with a recurring character, African-American Officer Clemons, while race riots raged down South. Here, the film cuts to footage of protesters pouring cleaning chemicals over black and white bathers in a swimming pool. In another episode, in the first year of the series when Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King’s killings dominated the news, Rogers’ sock puppet alter ego asked, “What’s assassination?” According to friends, family, and colleagues, the tiger puppet Daniel Stripe—timid-seeming, but always forthright with his feelings—was really a conduit straight to Rogers’s purest self, his inner child. In a later episode he and Betty Aberlin perform a duet: “Was I a mistake?” sings Daniel, unconsoled despite her harmonizing reassurances. “Simple and deep,” as Rogers was known to say, “is always better than shallow and complex.”
“I believe that appreciation is a holy thing,” he said in a 2002 commencement address at Dartmouth College, “that when we look for what’s best in the person we happen to be with at the moment, we’re doing what God does. In appreciating our neighbor, we’re participating in something truly sacred.” Students protested at the time, saying they’d have preferred a statesman to a children’s entertainer, but Dartmouth remembers this speech, next to Eisenhower’s “Don’t Join the Book Burners,” among its all-time best.
Fred Rogers had a saintly sway over even the stubbornest non-believers, and that gift helped him save PBS’s funding when the network’s $20 million annual budget was on the chopping block during the Nixon era. Testifying at a Senate hearing, Rogers recited lyrics from the song “What Do You Do With the Mad that You Feel?” that he performed on the show to teach children restraint when they’re tempted to lash out in anger. “I can stop when I want to. Can stop when I wish. Can stop, stop, stop anytime. I know that there’s something deep inside that helps us become what we can,” and the sternest of the senators there, disarmed by Rogers’ wisdom and strangeness, softens. “I think it’s wonderful,” he says. “You just earned the $20 million.”
Rogers, who can melt the iciest of hearts, takes on a superheroic quality. The scourge he couldn’t cure, and which never ceased to bother him, Neville finds, was when people—adults, more so than his target audience—misunderstood the mission of his ministry. “You’re special, and what that ultimately means of course is that you don’t ever have to do anything sensational for people to love you,” he told graduates not long before he died. It’s made to seem, in the film, that Rogers offered these clarifying words as an answer to what was by then a fairly common culture-warrish misconception of his intended influence: “Blame It On Mister Rogers: Why Young Adults Feel So Entitled” a Wall Street Journal headline flashes across the screen, although the actual op-ed ran years after his death. That was followed by a clip from Fox News, making the same point in more violent language, in 2013.
Most of what we see on television demeans life, in Rogers’ view, wasting and disrespecting the precious time we have on earth together. “We all have only one life to live,” he said. “And through television, we have the choice of encouraging others to demean this life or to cherish it in creative, imaginative ways.” Are we wrong, I wondered—while grown men and women sniffled all around me in a downtown D.C. movie theater and the words of an especially heartfelt Variety review ran through my mind—to make Mister Rogers a character in our political dramas? In doing so, do we not demean him somewhat?
Whether or not you’d trade him for our current president, the surge of attention we’re paying Fred Rogers in 2018 owes a great deal to the fact that he and Donald Trump are archetypal opposites. But the phenomenal influence Fred Rogers had while he lived was due more to his singular spirit than to our politically heightened need to be his neighbor. In reality, it’s hard to know where Rogers would have fit within the anti-Trump Resistance. He was a lifelong Republican, one friend reveals early in the new documentary. And, more essentially still, he was an ordained evangelical Presbyterian. His mission to impart grace to millions of individual children through their TV sets made him the 20th century’s truest televangelist. Telling every single child she’s special, that she’s made today a special day by being present, being herself, sets her not on a path of vapidity and self-absorption. It sets her up to see that she, like the billions of other boys and girls on earth, has a soul.
Every episode included a trip to a factory or store of some kind, reinforcing a comprehensible sense of the world beyond the neighborhood—a world simpler and deeper, more decent, than our own. One where men worked with their hands to make useful things, one we’re not wrong to long for. I remember being particularly charmed when Rogers visited a cardigan factory, where a worker led him through the rigging of a mechanical loom. His personal interest in this product that was an essential accessory to his ritual transformation from workaday gentleman to my neighbor—Rogers would hang up his suit jacket and change into a colorful cardigan, then take off his leather shoes and put on sneakers at the start of every episode—was a special privilege. So is every minute, every little revelation of Rogers the man, every friend and colleague’s loving and grateful testimony, in Won’t You Be My Neighbor. He’s hagiographed by committee: a composite, as if one were possible, of every life he touched. There were many millions more.
