Toward the end of Won’t You Be My Neighbor? director Morgan Neville includes a few TV broadcasts by people who think Mr. Rogers was destroying America. And, they’re the picture of everything Fred Rogers resisted – they’re noisy, accusing; their faces are contorted with anger. Fred Rogers, on the other hand, was soft-spoken, gentle, respectful and truthful. He did not threaten the existence of the republic – unless the republic needs even more anger than it’s got, and unless kindness is what will ruin us.
I was too old for the TV show “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” when it started in 1968. The first inkling I got of how the show touched children was watching a 3-year-old friend sit quietly in front of the TV and softly respond when Mr. Rogers greeted the children or asked a question. The show didn’t wind her up or set her to hyperactive pacing. For that half-hour she was calm and relaxed. Rogers died in 2003, but the film includes clips from the many interviews he did during his lifetime. As Rogers says in one of them. “You don’t need to wear a funny hat to have a relationship with children.” And children were taken by his unassuming ways; even through the TV screen, children seemed to trust him.
Rogers appreciated silence. On the show and off, he pauses before he speaks and then his words come slowly and quietly. He was a thoughtful man, who seemed to think before he opened his mouth. Silence was not dead air for Mr. Rogers. Silence was articulate. Silence gave his young viewers – and the adults in the audience – time and space to absorb and understand tough subjects, because Rogers did not avoid the tumult and crises of the world outside the show.
When a fight over integrating public swimming pools became news, Rogers sits with his bare feet in a small tub. Officer Clemmons, the show’s African-American policeman character, enters and tells Mr. Rogers that his feet hurt after a long day. So, Mr. Rogers invites Officer Clemmons to take off his shoes and join the foot bath. And you get a shot of two pairs of feet – one black, one white – together enjoying the tiny pool.
Rogers understood metaphor. He introduced the assassination of Robert Kennedy with a balloon suddenly losing its air, and then show regular Judy Rubin talks to the tiger puppet about what the word “assassination” means. Early in the movie, Rogers at a piano describes helping children through what he called “difficult modulations,” meaning changes in life – and he does this by showing the easy musical shift from C to F, and the harder one from F to F#.
Director Morgan Neville understands Fred Rogers well. Like Rogers, the film Won’t You be My Neighbor? moves slowly and gracefully. The movie doesn’t rush; it doesn’t push; it gently unfolds a portrait of a remarkable man. The documentary respects Fred Rogers, and it respects the audience well enough to give us the room to take in what this man did and stood for in his life. The film lets the audience grasp the notion that simplicity can be rich and complicated.
Rogers was driven by his belief that children – and other people – deserve respect. To do that, his show created a deceptively simple environment – Mr. Rogers comes in the door, and right away changes from a suit jacket into one of his famous cardigan sweaters. He takes his audience into a protected world where viewers might breathe easy and then be able to absorb sometimes difficult things.
Won’t You Be My Neighbor? copies the spirit of the TV show. You can see through fresh eyes, and if you didn’t already know it, you can see that to a world full of rude hostility, Fred Rogers offered the opposite.
