Review of Won't You Be My Neighbor? (2018) by Paul D — 12 Jul 2018

I grew up before Sesame Street and Mister Rogers, and so I lack the nostalgic ties to Fred Rogers that other moviegoers may possess. Ponderous and hagiographical, the movie details the career of what can most accurately be described as a very unusual man who just happened to find a noncompetitive niche for his talents in the nascent public TV medium.

The biographical elements that might have made the movie much more interesting to people who were acquainted with Fred Rogers primarily through Eddie Murphy and Johnny Carson's parodies of him--where did he grow up, what were his parents like, what were his experiences growing up in school, how did he meet and court his wife, what did his kids have to endure as a result of having such an unusual father, what drew him to focus his work on preschoolers--are conspicuously absent from this biographical documentary.

Moviegoers leave the theater having viewed a worshipful account of the adult professional life of an apparently virtuous but--frankly--downright weird character whose most salient characteristic was being so consistently strange that other people found him disarming.