A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood review, Culture Whisper (LFF)
There’s a minute of perfect silence in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood that’s hard to forget.
The real-life children’s presenter Fred Rogers, played by a sugar-sweet Tom Hanks, is having lunch with the gloomy, cynical journalist Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys), who's interviewing him for a profile piece. Spending time with Rogers’ lovingly empathetic personality causes Vogel to rethink some things in his life: chiefly his frosty relationship with his father, and his new duties as a dad himself.
Rogers tells him, over a vegetarian meal, to take a minute remembering those he loves, those who’ve shaped him. Director Marielle Heller stays in this moment and Jody Lee Lipes’s camera slowly presses closer to Rogers. The quiet ambience of the restaurant settles in. For a few delicate moments, it’s as if he’s speaking to us; daring us to think of our own loved ones. Such is the soft charm of Mr Rogers.
