How nice was Fred Rogers? So preternaturally nice that, when a youthful Eddie Murphy spoofed him in “Mister Robinson’s Neighborhood,” a running skit on “Saturday Night Live,” Mr. Rogers—as everybody called him then and still refers to him now, sixteen years after his death—replied with the mild suggestion, on “Late Night with David Letterman,” that many such parodies were done “with real kindness in their hearts.” Pause. Mr. Rogers turned to the audience: “Do you think that?” He also showed a Polaroid of Murphy and himself, all smiles. Grudges were not worth the bearing. That’s how nice he was.
What matters most, in that clip, is the pause. And the pause is one of the many things—the litany of timings, expressions, and deeds—that Tom Hanks gets right in his depiction of Mr. Rogers, in Marielle Heller’s “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.” As Mr. Rogers enters the house at the start of his TV show, we are offered the full range of ceremonial tropes. The jacket is hung up in the closet and replaced by a zipped sweater. The outdoor shoes are removed (Hanks makes sure to toss ’em lightly from hand to hand) and replaced by footwear more suited to the home. No chore is a drag. No detail deserves to be ignored.
Whenever well-known gestures, manual or vocal, are re-created with this care, you are somehow compelled to examine them afresh. That’s why we cleave to great mimics; whether you prefer Jay Mohr’s Christopher Walken imitation to Kevin Pollak’s, for instance, the effect of the comparison is to leave you a little more Walkenized—always a blessing. Likewise, in the new film, Hanks leaves us not just consoled by Rogers but curious about what drove him. In addition to being the host, the composer, and the puppeteer on his own show, from 1968 to 2001, Mr. Rogers was a Presbyterian minister, and, thanks to Hanks, the business with the shoes and the sweater begins to resemble a secular robing, as if we were in a vestry rather than in a television studio. The pauses, too, are more liturgical than polite. Mr. Rogers can’t see his parishioners, but he knows that they’re out there, and he waits for their response.
Fans of Mr. Rogers should have had their fill, you might think, after “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?,” last year’s affable documentary about him. Marielle Heller, though, is not content with affing. She likes to draw out recessive characters—the unhappy, the untrustworthy, or the downright unlikable—and bring them, however uncertainly, into the light. In “Can You Ever Forgive Me?,” also released in 2018, this tricky feat was accomplished with the help of Melissa McCarthy and Richard E. Grant; now, in the new film, Heller turns to Matthew Rhys. He plays Lloyd Vogel, a magazine journalist who, priding himself on tough assignments, is taken aback when told to interview Mr. Rogers. Lloyd has a smart and loving wife, Andrea (Susan Kelechi Watson), but a woeful relationship with his estranged father, Jerry (Chris Cooper). Not estranged enough, as far as Lloyd is concerned, and father and son come to blows at a family wedding. A bashful Lloyd rolls up to meet Mr. Rogers with his face cut and bruised. “A softball injury,” he explains. Yeah, right.
From here on, you can see where the story—wounded soul meets healer—is heading, and, to be honest, I was half dreading the result. It should be called “The Hack Whisperer,” and it’s not a film, let us say, that I would willingly screen for Billy Wilder. There are toy-town sequences, in which a puppet-size Lloyd suddenly finds himself, alive and plaintive, amid the model buildings on the set of the show. And I could have done without the scene in the New York subway, when Mr. Rogers is spontaneously serenaded by a carriage filled with admirers. Still, however obvious the emotional setup, Heller, Hanks, and Rhys manage, Lord knows how, to skirt the pitfalls of mush, and to forge something unexpectedly strong.
Anyone hoping for shocking disclosures from “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” will go away disappointed, and the article that Lloyd presents to his editor is clearly more paean than exposé. Yet the film, to its credit, provides far from comfortable viewing, and some of the silences are deliberately awkward. At the end of a show, once everyone has departed, we see Mr. Rogers sit and play softly at a piano. Pause. Then he hammers down on the low notes, in one big boom, as if to vent a frustration at which we can only guess. His wisdom feels hard won, and his decency hedged with doubts. (His sole rival in this respect, perhaps, is Charles M. Schulz.) What we have here, in other words, is the long-awaited antidote to “Forrest Gump” (1994)—a huge hit from which, despite being an ardent Hanksian, I still flinch. That movie sanctifies ignorance, whereas Heller’s, equally gentle, explores not simplemindedness so much as simplicity, a rarer gift. As Lloyd says of Mr. Rogers, “I just don’t know if he’s for real.” Strange to say, he is.
If you had never heard of the United States, and saw a double bill of “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” and Scott Z. Burns’s new movie, “The Report,” what would you make of this unfamiliar land? On the one hand, it features acts of thoughtful kindness performed by men in leisurewear; on the other hand, it is a bleak zone, where acts of calculated malice are funded by taxpayers, investigated, and, in the mind of the nation, consigned to near-oblivion. The two films might as well take place on different planets. What’s so united about that?
The title of Burns’s movie refers to a study of the C.I.A.’s Detention and Interrogation Program that was commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee. In short, the high-ups wanted to take a look at weird shit. The final document, running to sixty-seven hundred pages, has never been made public, but a director’s cut of five hundred and twenty-eight pages was released five years ago. Dianne Feinstein, who chaired the committee from 2009 to 2015, is played by Annette Bening, with perfect pitch; any instinctive liberal alarm, you sense, has to be calmed and schooled by the demands of senatorial Realpolitik. Bening sets the tone for the whole movie, which is heavy on procedure and seeks your undivided attention. Bathroom breaks are verboten. Sit up, cross your legs, and watch.
The upright citizen—or, viewed from another angle, the beleaguered schmuck—in charge of producing the report is a staffer named Dan Jones (Adam Driver). We learn almost nothing about Dan’s life outside the job, for two reasons. One, because Burns wants no lull or letup in the central drama. And, two, because, if Dan’s mission really is the demoralizing and coffee-driven grind that it appears to be, he has no life elsewhere. He says that he prefers to work “behind the scenes,” and his wish is grimly granted. Month after month, he and other researchers perch in a basement chamber, under grayish-blue light, and stare at screens. At the start, they don’t even have a printer. I’ve known fridges where more is going on.
Yet “The Report” has purpose and grip, as does any film that carries the stamp of Adam Driver. He’s tall, but his gait is too pigeon-toed to be a stride. (The same was true, oddly enough, of John Wayne.) And his face, though long and carved, is anything but impassive. When Dan, deep in his Sisyphean task, finds the weight of his conscience unendurable, he takes appropriate action and winds up needing a lawyer. Or so he believes. “You don’t have a legal problem,” the lawyer tells him. “You have a sunlight problem.” I tried to summon an image of Dan on a beach, sipping a Daiquiri and oiling his chalky skin, but nothing came.
To be fair, there are kinetic sights in Burns’s film; what’s peculiar is that they exert less dramatic pressure than the supposedly boring ones. In flashback, we meet a couple of goons, played with seamy persuasion by T. Ryder Smith and Douglas Hodge, who call themselves psychologists and are hired by the C.I.A. to make life hell—a repetitive hell—for various suspects in the war on terror. Brace yourself for waterboarding and other tools of torture, wielded in grainy gloom.
Convincingly nasty though such sequences are, I’m not convinced that we need them. “The Report” is most galling when it portrays the bureaucracy of the inhumane, and what has stayed with me are the briefings in which the goons, with a smear of pride, announce their methods and aims. We hear of “Walling,” “Use of Insects,” and “Mock Burials.” Of the three stages in a prisoner’s submission: “Debility. Dependency. Dread.” And of the desired end: “Learned Helplessness.” The language crawls with cruelty. A mature democracy, in short, is not defeating its enemies—some of whom may have been wrongly identified—with courage or guile but turning them back into infants. No wonder the eventual report is so heftily redacted; Dan’s hard labor is made to seem like an exercise in futility, as entire pages are reduced to thick stripes of black. When the shame becomes too much to admit, block it out. ♦