Hot Docs '18: Won't You Be My Neighbor?

April 29, 2018

Hot Docs '18: Won't You Be My Neighbor?

**/****
directed by Morgan Neville

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 26-May 6, 2018 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda It says a lot about the ideological thinness of the Resistance™ against the current American administration that the basic dignity of a lifelong conservative-values Republican gets elevated to the most rarefied heights in Morgan Neville's Won't You Be My Neighbor?. Though nominally a celebration of the life and storied career of children's broadcaster Fred Rogers, anchored in present-day talking-head interviews with collaborators and friends that threaten at times to bludgeon the delicate and achingly sincere archival footage of Rogers's show "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood", Neville's film has a bit more teeth as a manifesto for how children's educational programming that resists the trends of busyness, noise, and violence can function as a form of public service, instilling values like neighbourly stewardship and mutual respect.

That's a welcome contrarian argument in a time when the value of a humanities education is even more casually derided by the hoi polloi than usual. It's also a fair summation of its subject's views on public broadcasting and the great potential in using children's art to acknowledge and help kids work through some of their uglier, less socially acceptable feelings, from rage to confusion. But Neville, whose own nonfiction aesthetic in recent Netflix outings like "Ugly Delicious" embraces polished modern design and disembodied voices shellacked over images of talented people using their hands to make beautiful things, doesn't seem to trust the footage to speak for itself, going far too often to the well of hagiography in spite of the faintest gesture towards nagging stories about Rogers's controlling tendencies or bullying treatment of a gay colleague, François Clemmons. At one point, Neville needlessly interrupts a remarkable clips reel of Mr. Rogers lessons in mundane procedural tasks like setting an egg timer or doing active breathing exercises to welcome a range of experts who tell us just how radical what we're seeing really is.

There's something genuinely fresh about the idiosyncratic, retro tenor of that footage, a sense that we're watching the first ASMR for children--or, as THE FILM STAGE's Dan Schindel astutely put it, "slow cinema for tots." That makes it all the more deflating when the aforementioned reel, and its rare historical example of how to take kids seriously as potential ethical consumers of television, is immediately cushioned and nullified by the explanation around it. This is a film that could use its own imaginative time-outs and procedural digressions--its own egg timer tutorials. In the absence of anything that formally daring, what we have is a serviceable but timid portrait of a children's entertainer whose methods were (if we can believe what we are allowed to process on our own) quietly radical, however genteel they might have seemed under the host's dusty khakis and scratchy knit sweaters.