Won’t You Be My Neighbor?: I’m Not Crying, WE’RE ALL CRYING!

My favorite rumor about Mister Rogers is that someone had once stolen his car, but when the thief found out who it belonged to, he promptly returned the vehicle with an apology note stating he didn’t know it was his. Whether or not that story is true is up for debate, but it’s a strong testament to the kind of impact he’s had on people. In an age where it feels like half of our celebrity heroes are secretly scumbags, Mister Rogers has embodied a sense of near inhuman purity and goodness capable of getting through even the most cynical of us. Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, the new documentary examining his life, career and legacy doesn’t have some big reveal or tell you much that you couldn’t find on Wikipedia, but that seems to be the point. And like the man himself, it’s deceptively profound in its modest simplicity.

I don’t think he needs an introduction, but I’m going to attempt to provide one anyway. Fred Rogers is best known as the star and creator of Mister Roger’s Neighborhood, an educational kid’s show that ran on PBS from 1968 to 2001, combining live-action segments, puppets and documentary footage with the goal of imbuing and reinforcing children with their own innate sense of self-worth. He began his career as a Presbyterian minister but made the career shift to child psychology and television production out of frustration with the excessive slapstick and commercialism of kid’s TV at the time. One of his greatest talents was his ability to talk to children at their own level, and would often use this to talk about difficult subject matter that shows of this stripe would avoid like the plague such as death, divorce, bigotry, war, racism, even topical issues like the Kennedy assassination and 9/11. Most surprising of all, his kindly nature didn’t suddenly dissipate when the cameras stopped rolling. He was genuine in the truest sense of the word, and for many generations, he was considered the moral compass of America.

Looking back as part of the last generation to have him as a childhood television mainstay, it’s astounding how radical and ahead of the curb he was, especially compared to his contemporaries. And of course a lot of that has to do with Fred himself. In our jaded society, it’s hard to believe that such an unaffectedly wholesome person could ever exist, let alone be such a beloved icon. But like I said, he had a knack for penetrating the callouses and finding the scared child in all of us. We’re talking about a man whose career was kickstarted by his disgust over a pie fight (Not a gun fight, not a fist fight, A PIE FIGHT!), and singlehandedly persuaded a hard-nosed senator not to cut PBS’s funding by quoting one of his own songs. It’s one thing to hear and read all these things about him but seeing them for yourself is another thing entirely.

The documentary consists mainly of talking head interviews with his surviving friends, family and co-workers and archive footage of interviews with the man himself. While no one has a single bad thing to say, they don’t exactly sugarcoat it. He was known to occasionally be irritable, he had an adult sense of humor, and he did have his own doubts and insecurities about what he was doing. The closest thing to a blemish on his reputation we have is when he asked actor Francois Clemmons to keep his homosexuality under wraps, but even then, he only did it out of fear of losing sponsors and was ultimately accepting of him. Meanwhile, Clemmons is one of the most prominent interviewees and talks about Fred like he was the reincarnation of Jesus. In fact, the only ones who had any kind of bone to pick with him were Fox News and the Westboro Baptist Church, the latter of which picketed his funeral.

While Fred is portrayed as the best realized version of a human being one could hope for, he was still a human nonetheless. One thing that the movie does extraordinarily is changing how you saw the show by connecting its setting and characters to his own struggles, particularly the significance of the number 143 and how he expressed himself through the puppets that populate the Neighborhood of Make Believe. Daniel The Tiger was the embodiment of all his childhood fears, worries and insecurities, as Fred was bullied as a kid for being overweight and chronic illness forced him to use his own imagination to keep himself entertained. King Friday, meanwhile, represented Fred’s own stubbornness and determination, which only grew more steadfast and rigid as he grew older. There’s also a segment dedicated to a failed primetime show of his called Old Friends New Friends, where he tried to reach out to adults in the same way to kids, but it only served to highlight that the main reason he was successful and beloved was because his audience was kids, and thus his message was all the more impactful.

Bottom line, Won’t You Be My Neighbor? is a phenomenal profile of a man who was a true force of good in this world. People say we need Fred Rogers now more than ever, but this movie reminds us we were lucky to ever have him at all. Some of us grew up to be the best versions of ourselves because of his guidance, and for that, I am grateful.

9/10