Siding with the angels

The more I look at the news, the more I miss Mr. Rogers.

I don't think he was a saint - he certainly didn't think so - but I think he was on the side of the angels, and it's remarkable how much what he said is close in message and meaning to the Dalai Lama - someone else who would deny sainthood, but is on the side of the light. Both men were/are highly disciplined spiritually, and in an almost indefinable way, available and elusive at the same time.

Take this past weekend - and you may.  It was a bit of a minefield with younger daughter, whose anxieties, for a multitude of possible reasons, have been particularly acute.

It seemed the right time to saunter down to the cinema, enduring the half-hour of commercials and promotions (because we're not good at finding our seats in the dark), to see A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood, with America's 21st century version of Jimmy Stewart, Tom Hanks.

This is a story "inspired by real events", so we've been warned it's largely made up, and this is emphasized by the introduction, which moves the plot from an imagined Mr Rogers' Neighborhood episode in Pittsburgh to New York by means of the miniature cityscapes of the sort that began each show.  You can tell that the toy cars are being moved by unseen human hands.  Seeing as Fred Rogers himself was always very clear about the difference between reality and make-believe, this is very appropriate.

I won't go into the story, which is based upon (okay, inspired by) a magazine article written by a journalist who is renamed for the movie.  It's a tale that pretty well anyone in the audience will recognize, and see the parallels of, in their own lives.  The Resident Fan Boy thought of his late parents and almost wept; I thought of my complicated relationship with my father, and my shortcomings as a mother, and didn't weep.  Heaven knows what younger daughter thought about, but she reported that she liked the movie.

It is well-written, well-acted, and believable, even if not literally true.  There is a remarkable moment in a coffee shop, where Fred Rogers, ever solicitous, ever elusive, asks the troubled journalist to perform one of Rogers' favourite spiritual exercises:  thinking, for ten seconds (it seems longer), of the person or persons who "have loved us into being."  The astonishing thing was the palpable silence that fell upon the audience at our cinema-showing.  It was quite a bit like the Silence that descends upon the Quakers at a Friends' meeting for worship.

There were a few musical surprises for me in the film; songs I've loved.  Only one of them reminded me of the 1990s in which the story is set.  It's a song by Tracy Chapman entitled "The Promise".  It's really not got much to do with Mr Rogers - yet it does, rather like the film has surprisingly little to do with Mr Rogers, yet is all about him.