Starring Tom Hanks, Matthew Rhys
Directed by Marielle Heller
Rating: ** ½ (two and a half stars)
Okay, here’s a shocker. I don’t think Tom Hanks is a great actor. Like our own Aamir Khan (even their physical resemblance is uncanny) Hanks is a competent, if somewhat bland actor who chooses his roles well.
His latest handpicked role is that of Fred Rogers, the legendary American daytime-show host who endeared himself to generations of young and old Americans with his merchandised on-camera faith-healing.
The problem with making a film on an icon so immaculately proper in character is that the presentation is predestined to a life of dullness. So the director (whose last film Can You Ever Forgive about a literary scam, was a masterpiece with a wickedly entertaining central performance by Melissa McCarthy) introduces a broken damaged journalist Lloyd Vogel (played with troubling authenticity by Matthew Rhys) who has a knack of winning interviewees over and then betraying them in print.
Llloyd is the perfect foil to the angelic Mr Rogers who doesn’t seem to have any chinks in his armour. At least, no chinks for his epic goodness to fall into. Hence the plot device of pitching pitch darkness against blinding light serves the purpose of colouring the narrative’s moral dynamics with some amount of juice.
Otherwise Hanks plays Rogers straight. What you see is what you get. A man so saintly you want to shake him until his pocket is emptied out. That the director is skilled in digging deep into the darkness of the soul (see her previous film) goes a long way in eschewing the over-sweetened environment almost of a cloying variety that would have killed any chances of a genuine dramatic conflict.
While Hanks’ Mr Rogers remains steadfast in its supreme nobility, Rhys’ jaded journalistic Lloyd is pulled out of his state of numbed insensitivity by and by. By the time Mr Rogers (and this film) finishes with Lloyd he is patched up with his estranged father (Chris Cooper, well played) and come closer to his supportive wife Andrea (Susan Kelechi Watson) and his baby boy. He offers to take break from his job to look after their baby while his wife goes out to work.
For a film that wants us to believe that pure selfless goodness can exist, there is a whole lot of manipulative sequences cluttering the storytelling. In an initial wedding scene when Lloyd punches his father I felt I was watching a daytime soap opera based on Turgenev’s Fathers &Sons. Even the way Lloyd lets his emotions find a free flow in the company of the televised do-gooder reeks of doctored healing.
So here is what Hanks’ latest attempt at playing the spiritual-emotional healer lacks. Honesty. It all seems too self-consciously designed, right down to the big magazine interview at the end where Lloyd the journalist for once, doesn’t do a hatchet job on his subject.
The journalist has learnt to love humanity. But what about the incredibly benign Mr Rogers? What does he do to vent negative emotions? In the film he claims he plays the lower keys of the piano all together to create a boom-boom-boom sound therapy. This is a Disney cartoon masquerading as flesh and blood. Does this guy have any negative thoughts? Does he do any of the things ordinary human beings do? Does he even go to the potty? Is he for real?
The film is too much in awe of the demi-god’s aura to challenge his halo. There is a feelingly done sequence on the subway train where a cluster of children and teenagers spot their beloved Mr Rogers and burst into his signature song ‘Won’t You Be My Neighbour?’
To me, the architects of this pseudo-biopic on the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, are part of the voices singing along with those kids on the train. Too much in awe to ask if the beloved Mr Rogers had any blemishes in his picture-perfect personality. Wasn’t the log-running television showing a monstrous one-destination money-making industry? Does Tom Hanks really believe Rogers was Mahatma Gandhi in a suit? Or is he happy to collect his whopping fee and play a man too good to be true and too bland to be beautiful.