Screening soon at Piccadilly Cinemas
(Reviewed by John Glennie)
Based on true events, the movie starts with Tom Hanks singing a song (yes, you read right!) as he opens his children’s TV show as real-life presenter Fred Rogers. On the other side of the equation, investigative journalist Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys, “The Americans”, “The Post”) is renowned for his hard-hitting articles. To his chagrin he is assigned to interview Fred, which is not his area of expertise.
Tom is an angry man with a very sour relationship with his estranged father Jerry Vogel (Chris Cooper) and this is evident early in the piece, when Jerry surprisingly attends his daughter’s wedding. When Lloyd turns up to interview Fred with a cut and bruised nose, his excuse of a softball accident doesn’t quite gel and Fred soon extracts the truth from his interviewer.
The subsequent interviews really turn out to be Fred attempting to “teach” Lloyd forgiveness. Lloyd’s wife Andrea (Susan Kelechi Watson, “Us”) tries to help resolve the differences between her husband and father-in-law which looks to be mission impossible.
It is quite an emotionally charged story but there were times it was a little boring and mid-way seemed to go at a tangent where it was hard to work out what was real and what was a dream! For me, I think it will appeal to American audiences who will probably be familiar with the real-life characters. It was well acted and there could possibly be yet another Oscar nomination for Tom Hanks, but I found the movie to be a bit ho-hum. There were very mixed reactions from viewers as they left the cinema – some loved it, some hated it and many in-between.
So please go and see it and make up your own mind!
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