Kelly Gutensohn

The opening scene- Mr Rogers comes in just like in his show, singing, sweaters, sneakers, etc. then he points to a board with several doors on it and tells the audience it’s a picture board, behind every door is a picture of someone, Mr. Mcfeeley, King Friday, Lady Aberlin, every time a door opens we see a character from the show, until he opens the next door and it’s John Rhys, with blood all over his face and a broken nose. From there the story follows John Rhys’ character, a bitter journalist with a wife and baby. John Rhys vividly describes his mother’s last moments, dying from cancer, he says “you hear they go peacefully, they don’t, she screamed, agonizingly until she passed out from screaming and then they revived her so she could scream some more. His father walked out on the family after cheating on the mom with multiple women, this is also described, the alcoholic, philandering father makes an appearance, drunk, at the sister’s wedding, her third marriage, he and John Rhys get into a drunken brawl, John’s face is badly damaged. That’s just the first ten minutes. The entire movie is about John Rhys’ character, the scenes you see in the trailer of Mr. Rogers are almost the only times Mr Rogers is in the movie. At one point Rhys hallucinates that he is a puppet in the neighborhood of make believe, the scene is weird and disturbing, he collapses and comes to later, in a guest bedroom of Mr Rogers house, he is woken up by Mr and Mrs Rogers pounding duet on pianos in the next room. His father tries to reunite with him, only to collapse of a stroke in the argument and end up in the hospital where we are told he is dying. He is moved to his home, where we spend the last part of the movie watching the father die and John Rhys struggle with his feelings. Mr Rogers shows up with a pie and takes a picture of the family around the death bed. The father dies. John Rhys decides to make his family a priority. Tom Hanks portrayal of Mr Rogers makes him seem creepy/weird/possibly evil. At one point John Rhys says to Mr Rogers, “it must have been hard to be your sons.” And Mr Rogers tilts his head back and squints and side eyes at John Rhys and doesn’t respond for a long pause which made my kids think he was possibly a child abuser, then when he did reply he said “thank you for that, thank you, I think it might have been hard to be my sons, I never thought about that.” This movie was not at all what I expected based on the trailers and reviews. I grew up watching Mr. Rogers, my kids watched Mr. Rogers, our family loved him. This movie was disappointing.