by Jordan Petteys, Photo Courtesy of SCAD Savannah Film Festival
Imagine you’re trekking uphill through life with a sheer veil covering your face –– kinda like mesh behind a screen door –– that same one your dog tore a hole through trying to chase a bunny. We spend January through mid-November cocooned behind a thin wall of fuzz while life kicks us all in the gut a few times. How’s your soul, Vogel? We’re too out of breath to talk about it.
Maybe it’s the fall colors or hopping bus stops that sends a little wind to blow the veil away from our cheekbones. Or the first snowfall, grandma’s cookies and the un-ignorable pain delivered with the holidays that softens up our hard edges to a message about kindness over cynicism. Regardless, “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” hits theaters a week before Thanksgiving and sons and daughters call their mothers, a coworker buys coffee for the janitor and a single aunt forgives her abusive ex-husband.
Other than the colorful stop motion clay productions of Pittsburgh and snippets of Daniel Tiger on a children’s TV show, the film takes place in hospital lobbies, apartment living rooms, deathbeds and behind the curtain. Cloudy days triumph over sunshine, not because the writers want to prove life is a lot worse than we make it out to be –– but because life happens at 100 mph and we’re all in need of roadside assistance. How’s your soul, Vogel? We’re a little too busy to think about it.
Fred Rogers provides us the May flowers we desperately seek after a fight with our partners, financial slump or a bad diagnosis. But his presence doesn’t remind us that things always get better –– isn’t that the phrase we’ve heard a million times already from the grocery clerk and our Facebook feed? Rogers doesn’t change the subject but he doesn’t have the answers either, “I asked him to pray for me because he’s awfully close to God.”
The conversation begs us for attention like the deadbeat dad outside our window, a stack of bills on the counter and dirty diapers. How’s your soul, Vogel? We’re too ashamed to admit it.
It might seem like Noah Harpster and Micah Fitzerman-Blue took 10 years to write about a friendship formed 21 years ago just to ask an audience how they’re really, really doing. Any movie could do that. But Mister Rogers demands us to tear the veil. To see Pittsburgh for its dirty snow mounds and smelly metros and adore it anyway. To forgive for the sake of friendship –– to listen for the sake of understanding –– to be a neighbor for the sake of really, really loving.
And to ask for the sake of compassion.
