The Namesake (2006) [PG-13] ****/*****

A film review by James Berardinelli for ReelViews.net.

The Namesake is an affecting drama spanning two generations of an Indian American family and exploring the generational and cultural conflicts that arise as a result of their assimilation into society. By carefully developing her characters and allowing us to believe they exist beyond what is shown on screen, director Mira Nair is able to cover 25 years without making the audience feel that the plot leaps forward awkwardly or that story gaps are left unfilled. The Namesake is a chronicle not so much of events but of individuals and the ways in which tension develops between them and how each makes peace with who he or she is.

The film confronts common problems faced by immigrants. They come to the United States and make sacrifices so their children can have better opportunities. Those children, growing up under the umbrella of Western influence, often reject all or a part of their parents' culture. This can cause pain and anxiety and create rifts between generations. The parents see their children's actions as rebellious; the children view their parents as backward and clinging to outmoded lifestyles. The Namesake certainly isn't the first film to address this situation, but it accomplishes something that most other productions of this nature (such as Bend It Like Beckham) do not do. By opening the tale with the parents as newlyweds and beginning the story well before the children are born, we are able to see the conflict from both sides and to gain a more complete understanding of the issues and misunderstandings that arise.

The Namesake starts during the mid-1970s in Calcutta, where Ashoke (Irfan Khan) and Ashima (Tabu) are introduced to one another and enter into an arranged marriage. It is not a love match but, over the years, affection grows. Shortly after the wedding, the couple moves to New York, where Ashoke has been living for the past two years. Ashima is lonely and wants to go home but Ashoke does his best to make her happy. They have two children: Gogol (Kal Penn), who is named after the Russian writer (leading to the movie's title), and Sonia (Sahira Nair). Both of them grow up as Americanized as any of their Caucasian classmates, to the point where Sonia resents a trip to India when she is a teenager. They leave home as soon as they can - Gogol to live with his white girlfriend, Maxine (Jacinda Barrett), and Sonia to go to college in California. But a tragedy reunites the family and forces the children to consider their heritage.

For Nair, this represents an opportunity once again to delve into the subject of societal melting pots and cross-cultural friction. Elements of the film echo themes Nair explored in Mississippi Masala and to which she has returned several times over the years. There is nothing preachy or strident in the way she approaches these issues. Instead, she takes a non-judgmental stance and depicts the real-life consequences such circumstances can have on those trapped on either side of the conflict. In The Namesake, the parents give their children more latitude than many first generation Americans. The result is greater freedom for Gogol and Sonia (even if they don't realize this) but more sadness for Ashoke and Ashima.

The acting is uniformly excellent. For the roles of Ashoke and Ashima, Nair has employed prolific Bollywood stars Tabu and Irfan Khan, both of whom give performances of great range and empathy. Tabu is especially popular in India; this is one of her first opportunities to display her talents to the international market and it is a favorable impression. Kal Penn plays Gogol as an adult and shows greater dramatic ability than one might have expected from someone whose best known credits are as a guy trying to find a hamburger joint and a stooge (with no dialogue) guarding Lex Luthor's back. Australian Jacinda Barrett once again plays the girl with all-American good looks. Nair's daughter, Sahira, is the adult Sonia and Rome's Zuleikha Robinson portrays another of Gogol's love interests.

The Namesake has a scope that many multi-generational stories lack. Often, it takes a mini-series to develop the kind of rapport with the characters that Nair achieves in a mere two hours. As is the case in real life, there are high points and low points, times of joy and times of tragedy, deaths and births, and marriages and divorces. We go through all of these things alongside the characters, seeing events through more than one pair of eyes and feeling emotions with more than one heart. It's difficult to overstate what the director and her screenwriter, Sooni Taraporevala, have achieved with this adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri's novel. They have taken events specific to one culture and produced a movie that is universal in its appeal and thematic content. The Namesake is a rich and moving motion picture. [Berardinelli’s rating: 3.5 out of 4 stars = 87.5%

Labels: cross-cultural, drama
IMDb 75/100
MetaScore (critics=82, viewers=79)
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=75, viewers=76)
Berardinelli’s review

Mona Lisa Smile (2003) [PG-13] ***/****

A film review by James Berardinelli for ReelViews.net.

Mona Lisa Smile is an exercise in relentless mediocrity - a trite melodrama that raises a number of interesting possibilities, then ignores them in favor of taking the safe path. In the process, it undermines its own thesis of female empowerment, and is guilty of underutilizing a vast pool of talent. Actresses Julia Roberts, Kirsten Dunst, and Julia Stiles are relegated to playing one-dimensional, uninteresting roles in a movie that could easily be dubbed Dead Poets Sorority. If the point of Mona Lisa Smile was to be as bland as possible, it accomplishes the goal.

The movie transpires on the campus of Wellesley College during the 1953-54 academic year. Katherine Watson (Julia Roberts), a new arts history teacher, is excited about the prospect of interacting with a student body comprised of the most intelligent women in the United States. But she is disappointed by what she finds - most of her students view their time at Wellesley as a steppingstone to wedded bliss. They do not deem it to be possible to have both a successful career and a marriage. After all, how would it be possible to have the dinner on the table every night if they're working? Betty Warren (Kirsten Dunst) is the biggest believer in a woman's traditional role, and becomes Katherine's most energetic sparring partner. Joan Brandwyn (Julia Stiles), Betty's best friend, is torn between marrying her boyfriend and applying to law school. Connie Baker (Ginnifer Goodwin) isn't concerned about marriage - she just wants to find a boyfriend. And Giselle Levy (Maggie Gyllenhaal) may be the most sexually liberated of the bunch, but she finds herself harboring a crush on her Italian teacher, Bill Dunbar (Dominc West), who, in turn, is pursuing Katherine.

The Dead Poets Society connection is both immediately obvious and misleading. Despite its manipulative tendencies, the 1989 film contained moments of great emotional power - an element that is lacking in Mona Lisa Smile. With only minor exceptions, everything that occurs during the movie's slow-paced 115 minutes is pre-ordained. If you have seen the trailers, you have seen the film. This is by-the-numbers plotting that takes no chances and offers an obligatory uplifting ending that is neither justified nor credible.

One of the supposed goals of Mona Lisa Smile is to underline the fact that women of the '50s could break out of traditionally defined roles and still live fulfilling lives. As an iconic representation of this new woman, Katherine fails. She is frustrated in her personal life, her career requires compromises she is unwilling to make, and Joan Brandwyn, one of her pet projects, disappoints her. The victory she wins at the end is pyrrhic; careful examination of the subtext might easily lead one to believe that the route to happiness necessitates giving in to tradition and making the most out of it. That's not the message the movie wants viewers to come away with, but, for those who take the time to look, it is there.

Julia Roberts is a fine actress, but she sleepwalks her way through this part, imbuing Katherine with little in the way of charm or passion. The opposite is true of Kirsten Dunst, who goes over-the-top in turning Betty into the most astonishingly one-dimensional bitch to hit screens this year. Julia Stiles shows even less personality than Roberts; her character is easily overlooked and is the most likely to be forgotten. Mona Lisa Smile's bright spots come from Maggie Gyllenhaal and Ginnifer Goodwin, whose performances are on-target and whose characters are interesting enough to warrant more screen time than they are given.

Mona Lisa Smile's director is Mike Newell, whose previous credits include the gangster film Donnie Brasco, the underrated jewel Enchanted April, and the internationally-known Four Weddings and a Funeral. For Newell, this is an inexplicable misstep. He tries his best to fashion an inspirational, feel-good tale, but the lack of compelling characters and the reliance upon formulas makes this movie a late-night cable TV time killer at best. The most likely facial expression to be elicited by Mona Lisa Smile is a grimace. [Berardinelli’s rating: 50/100 (2 out of 4 stars)]

Labels: college, drama, Fifties, Julia Stiles
IMDb 65/100 
MetaScore (critics=45, viewers=70) 
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=49, viewers=70) 
Blu-ray 

Emily in Paris (2020) [TV-MA] ****

A film review by Roxana Hadadi for rogerebert.com on October 1, 2020.

Emily in Paris is a Bland Sex and the City Imitation with No Identity of Its Own

Darren Star’s TV shows have long been dismissed as frothy confections interchangeably obsessed with wealth and sex, but they’ve never been boring. With their perpetual angst and recurring bed hopping, Beverly Hills, 90210 and Melrose Place pushed back against the conservatism of primetime TV. Sex and the City not only revived HBO and introduced new generations to Manolo Blahnik shoes, but also brought questions about women’s sexual desire to the pop-culture forefront. And Younger has been a surprise hit for TV Land, morphing into a cult favorite that amusingly tackles questions of ageism and sexism.

None of the same praise can be leveled toward Star’s newest effort, Emily in Paris. All of the criticisms that have previously been leveled at Star are actually valid when it comes to the Netflix series, which is so devoid of narrative tension that it barely qualifies as entertainment. The show doesn’t seem to have an understanding of the social media or marketing industries on which it is focused; it mistakes having a closet full of designer clothes as possessing a personality; and it relies so much on farcical national stereotypes that it might bring back traumatizing flashbacks of Carrie, Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte’s trip to Abu Dhabi in the loathsome Sex and the City 2. Lily Collins does her best at playing a Midwestern girl swept up in the glamour of Parisian living, but the show overall is irredeemably inauthentic and aggravatingly superficial.

From its very first scene, Emily in Paris introduces its protagonist, Emily Cooper (Collins), as a striver and a go-getter. On a cold Chicago morning, Emily runs five miles in 41 minutes, a pleased smile spreading over her face when her exercise app informs her that she shaved 18 seconds off her previous personal best. Emily is used to success: She’s a rising star at the Gilbert Group marketing firm, having made her name on pharmaceutical and geriatric care products, and she’s in a committed relationship. But when her pregnant boss (Kate Walsh) is forced to back out of a one-year work assignment in Paris with a smaller luxury marketing company, Savoir, that the Gilbert Group just acquired, the responsibility falls to Emily.

Emily sees the opportunity as an adventure, a chance to live in a beautiful place and further her career. There are just a few issues: She doesn’t speak French, and she doesn’t have any experience marketing the wares in Savoir’s portfolio, like couture fashion or fragrance. But no matter! Emily is sassy, and she says the words content and engagement a lot, and she has what the show insists are great ideas. Despite the French haters, Emily will make it work.

That broad generalization is about the level of detail that Star puts into characterizing the professional challenges that Emily encounters in her new position. The focus of Emily in Paris more often becomes how mean the French people are to Emily, from her cranky landlady to her boss, Sylvie (Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu), who is offended by everything about the American now in their office. Emily’s experience was in marketing IBS medication, Sylvia smirks, so how could she understand what the French people want in, say, lingerie? But expecting any Mad Men-style scenes explaining how Emily comes up with any of her immediately magical ideas is a fool’s errand, because Emily in Paris instead relies over and over again on how Emily’s winning American pluck helps her overcome any problem.

There is nothing more to Emily than the fantastic outfits (imagined by Sex and the City costume designer Patricia Field) that somehow fit in her cramped apartment with what is described as only one drawer. She is a social media savant who somehow accrues thousands of Instagram followers with eye-rolling captions like Drinking champagne in Champagne, and who claims to know the American consumer without any data or statistics to back that up. At least Sex and the City showed us Carrie writing, shopping, dating, and doing things in life that informed her work and her point of view. Whether you liked Ms. Bradshaw or not, you understood her, the tenors of her friendships, and how the kind of person she imagined herself as sometimes contrasted with how she actually acted. There is none of that depth in Emily in Paris, which is only interested in its titular character in terms of what she wears and who she kisses. And even then, it all falls flat - the love triangles, the workplace rivalries - because there’s no passion to anything Emily does. Collins is always ready with a broad smile and a peppy delivery, and she gamely plays along with how often Star writes in genitalia-related humor (a whole episode centered around the French word coq!), but Emily never feels like a real person.

Perhaps all of this would be excusable, or even tolerable, if Emily in Paris treated its main character with any skepticism at all. To the show’s credit, it briefly engages with this idea when Emily meets a client who calls her a basic bitch for decorating her purse with a keychain shaped like the Eiffel Tower. For a moment, it feels like the show’s incongruous details about Emily - that she grew up in the Midwest, but doesn’t know how to clean a cast-iron pan; that she’s been taking months of French classes, but doesn’t know that an aubergine is an eggplant; that she loves eating Parisian cuisine, but doesn’t know that the dessert crème brulee has a crisp top of burnt sugar - are hints that she isn’t as sophisticated as she would like to believe, and that she has in fact been performing a version of herself. But Emily in Paris veers away from that more subversive consideration of its protagonist by giving her an impassioned monologue about how basic bitches are the backbone of the fashion industry; the designer to whom she is delivering her lecture comes around, of course, and the two bond over the show Gossip Girl.

That setup - Emily correcting the French by proclaiming how great Americans really are - is one Emily in Paris returns to often, much like how Star had Carrie quit Paris in the final season of Sex and the City. The tactic is never as cute as the show thinks it is. And Emily in Paris is so certain of Emily’s perfection that there is no real impact when she makes a mistake, like pursuing a friend’s boyfriend, flirting with a client, or potentially ruining Paris Fashion Week. Problems are wrapped up within each episode’s 30-minute run time and previous subplots rarely carry over, which is particularly strange when the show attempts to tackle the #MeToo movement and the French perspective. Emily becomes the voice of harassed women, making a grand speech with a number of buzzwords about female strength and the male gaze. But that perspective comes out nowhere; before that point, we had no idea what Emily thought about feminism. And the subject never comes up again, although it would have been thought-provoking for the show to consider whether Emily’s ideology complicates the work she does with luxury brands that so often rely on traditional standards of female beauty to sell their products. Emily in Paris drops the conversation before it gets interesting.

Perhaps the only way to enjoy Emily in Paris is to watch it with the knowledge that the characters surrounding Emily are more intriguing than she is, like Mindy Chen (Ashley Park), the Chinese heiress-turned-reality-show-contestant-turned-nanny who befriends Emily and serves as her Samantha, or Emily’s boss, Sylvie, who has achieved so much success in a field dominated mostly by men, and who is understandably annoyed by Emily’s prying into her personal life. Leroy-Beaulieu’s performance is particularly strong, and Sylvie’s cynicism serves as a refreshing contrast to Emily’s relentless positivity. Also solid is the show’s direction, which is crisp and effective, although overly reliant on pop songs for scene transitions. Technically, Emily in Paris is well-made, but the show’s shortcomings - from its simplistic depiction of French culture to its paper-thin protagonist - make it more of an irritation than an indulgence. [Hadadi’s rating: 2 of 5 stars.

Labels: comedy, drama, fashion, Netflix, Paris, romance
IMDb 73
MetaScore(critics=62, viewers=57) 
RottenTomatoesAverages (critics=63, viewers=64)
Link to review 
Netflix

The Highwaymen (2019) [R] ****

A film review by James Berardinelli for ReelViews.net on March 30, 2019.

It has taken Hollywood more than fifty years to produce a rebuttal to Arthur Penn’s classic Bonnie and Clyde. In the romanticized 1967 gangster film, law enforcement in general and Frank Hamer in particular were portrayed as bumbling up until the final ambush. John Lee Hancock’s The Highwaymen shows, as Paul Harvey was fond of saying, the rest of the story. In this iteration of Bonnie & Clyde’s final act, Hamer (Kevin Costner), is presented as a solid, competent lawman who divines the doomed couple’s location not through luck (as in Bonnie and Clyde) but as a result of deduction and investigation. Although nowhere near as lush, artistic, and downright entertaining as the Warren Beatty - Faye Dunaway interpretation, The Highwaymen hews closer to the historical facts, with the climactic ambush being filmed on-location where it happened.

Despite arguments by Hancock to the contrary, there are times when John Fusco’s screenplay accepts unproven myths and legends (especially about Bonnie) as facts. The story starts with Texas governor Ma Ferguson (Kathy Bates at her sourpuss best) holding her nose and reluctantly agreeing to bring back retired Texas Rangers Frank Hamer and Maney Gault (Woody Harrelson) to supplement the official police and FBI taskforce tracking Bonnie and Clyde. While the younger agents and cops working the case aren’t openly antagonistic toward the old timers, neither are they deferential. But Hamer’s tenacious, methodical approach works where the newfangled technology-driven methodology fails.

The climactic ambush is staged differently than the one in Bonnie and Clyde. In addition to being shown from the lawmen’s perspective, it’s less over-the-top. As was the case in real life, Clyde doesn’t get out of the car and there’s no long, wordless exchange of loving looks between the two outlaws. The sickening souvenir-hunting that follows the massacre, after the bullet-riddled Ford with the two outlaws still inside had been towed into Gibsland, is reflective of what happened and says something ugly about human nature.

Although there is some humor in The Highwaymen, it, like everything else in the film, is dry. The movie is at times too serious for its own good and the borderline-dour tone deflates the buddy film aspect. It’s as if director John Lee Hancock wanted to put as much distance between his movie and the one made a half-century ago by Arthur Penn that he avoids anything that could be misinterpreted as campy. In the process, however, he leeches some of the fun out of the proceedings.

The screenplay had been kicking around for more than a decade before the project finally moved into production. In its nascent stage, it had been envisioned as one last Redford - Newman pairing. After Newman’s death, Redford backed out. The next iteration matched Harrelson with Liam Neeson; when the latter wasn’t available, Costner stepped in. Watching the Dances with Wolves actor in this role, it’s hard not to remember his turn as Elliot Ness in The Untouchables and, although the two lawmen are dissimilar in many ways, Costner’s portrayal of Hamer shows how much he has grown as a performer over the years. He’s relaxed, confident, and exhibits solid chemistry with Harrelson. However, although the two actors work well together, The Highwaymen might have benefitted from more time exploring their relationship. That aspect is too thin to satisfy.

The Highwaymen’s straight-to-Netflix distribution should boost its profile. Although it would have been a close call to recommend for theatrical viewing, I have no reservations about endorsing it for home viewing. It’s a solid, mostly factual reflection of events that have embedded themselves in the Depression-era’s gangster mythology. No film is ever going unseat Bonnie and Clyde as the definitive telling of the crime duo’s exploits but The Highwaymen’s different outlook makes it a worthy, if lesser, companion piece. [Berardinelli’s rating: 3 stars out of 4]

Blogger’s comment: While my memories of the Beatty – Dunaway Bonnie and Clyde have dimmed over the years, I recently watched a documentary on the subject and remember that there were several reasons why the duo’s crime spree went on as long as it did. First, this was the depths of the Depression (1932-34) and the pair only robbed banks, banks that were at the time repossessing failed farms and businesses, they were viewed as folk heroes. Indeed The Highwaymen reported at the end that 20,000 people came to Bonnie Parker’s funeral, and 15,000 to Clyde Barrow’s. Second, they sought out fast, powerful Ford V8s as getaway cars, and apparently Clyde Barrow even wrote a letter to Henry Ford praising him for manufacturing the car. Third, they also robbed army armories, stealing Thompson submachine guns, Browning Automatic Rifles (BARs), semiautomatic pistols and hand grenades, so they totally outgunned local police forces who often had to buy their own .38 caliber revolvers and ammunition.

SPOILER: I was impressed by the fact that The Highwaymen recreated the final ambush at the same spot on the highway near Gibsland, in rural Bienville Parish, Louisiana where it actually took place on May 23rd, 1934. Also, in keeping with Frank Hamer’s character, he had Ivy Methvin (W. Earl Brown), father of one of the Barrows gang members, jack up his pickup truck and take a tire off, as though he was changing a flat tire, under the assumption that Clyde Barrow would stop to help him. And when Barrow did stop, Hamer stepped out of the bushes alone, standing in front of the car with his BAR raised and ordering the pair to raise their hands. He gave the pair five seconds to respond and when they reached for their weapons, assuming they had a chance against a single man, the entire team of half a dozen lawmen from Texas and Louisiana opened fire from ambush. While some thought the pair should have been given a chance to surrender, The Highwaymen notes that at least nine police officers and four civilians were murdered by the pair, and that Clyde Barrow’s father Henry (William Sadler) had told Hamer his son would never be taken alive.

Label: biography, crime, drama, Netflix, tragedy

Internet Movie Database 69 

MetaScore (critics=58, viewers=72) 

RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=59, viewers=77) 

Capture of Bonnie and Clyde 

Self-Guided Tour 

Bonnie and Clyde (1967) IMDb page
Netflix

The Social Dilemma (2020) [PG-13] ****

Link to a film review by Neil Minow for rogerebert.com on Sept. 8, 2020.

Labels: documentary, drama, Netflix
IMDb77/100 
MetaScore (critics=78, viewers=77) 
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=74, viewers=80) 
Netflix
Five tips from experts to avoid social media manipulation

Little Women (2019) [PG] *****

A film review by James Berardinelli for ReelViews.net on Dec. 24, 2019.

Little Women is like Hamlet and Pride and Prejudice – the story is so well-known (and well-loved) that any new motion picture adaptation becomes more about screenwriting choices (what’s left in and what’s taken out) and performances. Contrasting Greta Gerwig’s 2019 version of the Louisa May Alcott story with the one most movie-goers remember, Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 interpretation (the one starring Winona Ryder, Claire Danes, Christian Bale and Susan Sarandon), feels a little like an apples-to-oranges comparison. Armstrong’s Little Women was a straightforward book-to-movie translation. Gerwig is trying for something a little different, juggling the time frame and creating a meta ending to make the story’s feminist themes overt and incorporate an ambiguous twist that some will see as clever and others may find heretical.

This is still recognizably Alcott’s Little Women, albeit put through a food processor. Instead of telling the story in a chronological fashion, Gerwig deconstructs the narrative and creates two separate time lines. She freely jumps from one to the other and back again, using visual cues (like the length of a character’s hair) to let us know whether we’re in the earlier portion of the story or the later one (the gap is about three years). Without going into details, the ending represents the most intriguing (and potentially controversial) aspect of the movie, reminding viewers that most scholars view Little Women as at least partially autobiographical and bringing elements of the real-life Alcott into the film. Although a perfectly valid direction in which to take things, it diminishes the book’s ending and may make some purists (if such a group exists) unhappy.

The movie focuses on the five women of the March family. The father (played by Bob Odenkirk when he finally makes an appearance more than halfway through the proceedings) is off doing Civil War missionary work, leaving behind his wife, Marmee (Laura Dern), and four daughters – Meg (Emma Watson), Jo (Saoirse Ronan), Beth (Eliza Scanlen), and Amy (Florence Pugh) – to fend for themselves in a situation of genteel poverty. The first timeline shows them living together under one roof with the primary subplots being the flirtation between Jo and the dilettante Laurie (Timothee Chalamet) and Jo’s obsession to become a writer. The second timeline proceeds after Meg has married a penniless tutor, John Brooke (James Norton), and moved away; Beth is dying; Amy is in France with her wealthy aunt (Meryl Streep); and Jo is in New York, pursuing her writing and a romance with the accomplished German immigrant, Friedrich Bhaer (Louis Garrel).

Gerwig, as one might expect, hones in on the feminist aspects of Alcott’s novel, focusing on Jo as the strongest figure in the movie (male or female) without deviating from the era-appropriate gender limitations. In other words, Jo is a forceful figure but not an anachronism. She is recognizably the same character Alcott brought to life on the written page. Gerwig is careful not to make Jo into an unassailable icon. Following a brief monologue in which she makes the case for exceptionalism, Jo utters the heartfelt, heartbreaking confession: I’m so lonely.

That moment, among many others, makes Saoirse Ronan’s Oscar nomination case. It’s no exaggeration to argue she may be the best-ever Jo March to grace the big screen (or the little one, for that matter, since Little Women has had its share of TV adaptations). Her acting demands recognition; she draws the camera’s attention when she’s on screen, which is most of the time, since the movie (like the book) favors her character. The other young actresses - Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, and Eliza Scanlen – offer capable portrayals but they don’t shine as brightly as Ronan. Among the respected group of secondary performers, it may be surprising that the standout is not Meryl Streep (although her portrayal of Aunt March is enjoyable, if seemingly influenced by Maggie Smith’s work in Downton Abbey). Instead, it’s Chris Cooper, who brings depth to a role with minimal screen time.

When it comes to a production like Little Women, the salient question is whether this new interpretation is needed. Does it add to the existing body of Alcott-inspired work or is it superfluous? Because of the strength of the acting (Ronan’s in particular) and Gerwig’s unusual (love it or hate it) reworking of the novel’s chronology and ending, it deserves to be seen. Time will tell whether it becomes as beloved for today’s generation as the 1994 version was for those born in the 1970s and 1980s. [Berardinelli’s rating: 3 out of 4 stars]

Labels: drama, romance, tragedy

Internet Movie Database 79 

MetaScore (critics=91, viewers=75) 

RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=85, viewers=90) 

Blu-ray 

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019) [PG] ****/*****

A film review by James Berardinelli for ReelViews.net on Nov. 22, 2019.

A case could be made that everything is made better with Mr. Rogers added to the mix. Take A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. A standard-order redemption/salvation drama about healing a poisoned father/son relationship, this story is leavened by the inclusion of Fred Rogers (Tom Hanks) as a key ingredient. The philosophy of kindness and inclusion taught by Rogers in his iconic TV series, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, which was so easy at one time to lampoon (just ask Eddie Murphy), has now become a touchstone for many who grew up with the program.

Although the advertising and marketing for A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood focuses heavily on Mr. Rogers, he is more of a supporting character than the lead. Based on the 1998 Esquire article, Can You Say… Hero? by award-winning journalist Tom Junod, the movie illustrates how, during the process of interviewing Mr. Rogers for a puff piece, the writer (re-named in the movie as Lloyd Vogel, and played by Matthew Rhys) undergoes a personal transformation. In trying to strip away Mr. Rogers’ TV image, Lloyd embarks on what amounts to a journey of self-discovery that results in the healing of a wound created when his father, Jerry (Chris Cooper), abandoned him and his dying mother. In addition to re-uniting with Jerry, Lloyd strengthens his bond with his wife, Andrea (Susan Kelechi Watson), and infant son. All the while, Mr. Rogers looks on serenely, offering homilies and advice as needed. In real life, he and Junod became fast friends following the article’s completion and the writer is on record as saying that Fred Rogers didn’t play a role on TV; the screen personality is real.

Director Marielle Heller (The Diary of a Teenage Girl) knows no shame when it comes to mining nostalgia for maximum effect. (I say that kindly.) From the movie’s Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood-inspired score to the Rogers-esque miniature cityscapes of Pittsburgh and Manhattan, Heller populates the film with visual cues and references. Joanne Rogers (Fred’s widow) and the real Mr. McFeely, David Newell, have cameos in a Chinese restaurant scene. The film’s re-creations of set pieces and episode segments are spot-on. Hanks sings full renditions of Won’t You Be My Neighbor? and It’s Such a Good Feeling as Mr. Rogers first dons his sneakers and cardigan at the beginning then removes them at the end. All of this may cause Gen-Xers and Millennials to tear up – although perhaps not as forcefully as when New York City subway riders break into a spontaneous serenade.

Goodwill permeates A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood and Heller doesn’t shy away from the anti-cynical nature of the story. At its core, this is about Rogers’ influence in saving a man’s soul. The message is that there are ways to manage sadness and anger. This is not a Fred Rogers biopic. What more could be done in that regard than was accomplished in 2018’s documentary, Won’t You Be My Neighbor? That featured Junod’s reminiscences, among those of others. The film is uplifting although there are moments of subtle melancholy. At the time when the movie transpires, Rogers was 71. The show was drawing to a close (it ended in 2001). Rogers would die of stomach cancer in 2003. Keeping all these things in mind, there’s a sense of doors closing.

How good is Tom Hanks in the role? In terms of recreating Fred Rogers’ appearance and voice, there are discrepancies. After all, there’s only so much a comb, makeup, and costume design can do to transform a recognizable A-list movie star into an equally recognizable children’s television host. There are times when, watching the movie, we’re aware that it’s Tom Hanks playing Mr. Rogers rather than simply Mr. Rogers. What the actor gets right, however, is the essence of the man – his innate gentleness, kindness, and ability to relate to children. When dissecting Hanks’ ability to inhabit the character of a real-life person, I’d place this behind his recreations of Walt Disney and Captain Phillips, and alongside that of Sully Sullenberger. In an ironic twist, after filming, Hanks learned via genetic testing that he and Mr. Rogers are distant cousins (sixth cousins, to be exact).

For those on the lookout for a motion picture antidote to the current climate of partisan bitterness and cynicism that permeates everyday life, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood stands ready. A celebration of Mr. Rogers and the healing capabilities of his words and doctrine, the movie may not be a splashy as many of the year-end multiplex stocking stuffers but the experience it offers tugs effectively at the heart strings. [Berardinelli’s rating: 3 out of 4 stars = 75%]

Labels: biography, drama, Tom Hanks

Internet Movie Database 73 

MetaScore (critics=80, viewers=72) 

RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=81, viewers=91) 

Blu-ray