Won't You Be My Neighbor (2018)
I grew up watching Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood more mornings than not. My mom probably remembers it better than I do, but from what I can recall I loved the show in my early childhood. In retrospect, Fred Rogers’s demeanor was probably a big part of that; the man was warm, compassionate, and more sophisticated than many of the other main characters of the other shows I watched alongside his. One of the questions that has sat in my mind about Rogers, though, is whether he was like the man on the show. To have that kind of demeanor in everyday life would completely shock me in the cynical, jaded world in which we live. The documentary on Rogers’s life Won’t You Be My Neighbor? answers this question of many with a resounding “yes.” This film is overwhelmingly optimistic yet not without a sense of grounded realism that Rogers himself possessed. It feels exactly like Fred Rogers the character which, it asserts quite confidently, was Fred Rogers the man. Instead of focusing ...