I have found films difficult to watch since my brain went holey. I suppose you could say that I’m living with PTSD and although mostly things are fine there are still circumstances that make my brain go fizzy. Circumstances like loud noises, flashing lights and being trapped somewhere.
The Long Suffering Husband loves film and because I love stories (of any kind) the cinema has always been the thing we do together. Now, he watches films alone unless he thinks they’ll be safe. 1917 he declared as something I could watch at home but Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, although an excellent film, is one I’ll probably never be able to watch. There are films we just decide to risk: I loved JoJo Rabbit.
After a day of sorting photos and a spot of death admin we decided that we needed a ‘nice’ film. The LSH had seen a trailer for A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood and thought it would be perfect.
“You can’t go wrong with a Tom Hanks’ film,” he assured me. “It’s about a children’s TV host. He’s nice.”
It sounded perfect.
It was supposedly based on this article by Tom Junod in Esquire magazine. https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a27134/can-you-say-hero-esq1198/
It would have been great.
Except.
They Hollywoodized it. (I know, not a real word)
In film, you can’t possibly tell a story of someone who is just ‘nice’. There has to be conflict. I understand this. It’s the clash that keeps our interest. In this film, they decided not to trash the dead man’s memory but instead re-wrote the journalist. Tom Junod has written about how they did that here:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/12/what-would-mister-rogers-do/600772/
The story of Mr Rogers is interesting and the contradiction is there because he was nice in a world that isn’t.
In this film, they make the journalist a ‘broken’ man. They give him a backstory full of childhood trauma. His drunken, philandering father had left him to watch his mother die, in a terrible way and the conflict resolution is that he forgives father and watches him die (supposedly peacefully).
“They say you just drift off to sleep when you die,” the journalist explains to Mr Rogers in the film, “but she didn’t. She screamed in pain, passed out, they revived her and she just went right back to it.”
I’ve seen a few ‘feel good movies of the year’ now where a writer re-frames a difficult death. It’s cheaper than therapy, I suppose. None of us want to believe that death can be horrible. We want to believe that it’s painless and just like drifting off to sleep. Any thought otherwise makes us feel less safe for our own death. If you’ve watched someone die a horrible death (you can see thestrals - sorry, distracted there - but JK Rowling is brilliant and a truth teller) then it might be therapeutic to re-imagine it. Instead of sitting at your dying father’s bedside watching them get frailer and frailer, the writer turns a death into a quest story where they complete everything on their bucket list. The sister refuses chemo to take part in a dance competition, which is much nicer than sitting for hours on a chemo ward. The boy stops feeling anger his father because he ran away when his mother screamed in pain and watches his dad slip away peacefully with his family around him, in a party atmosphere. I don’t begrudge these writers their therapy. I’ve done it too but I do wonder if a little more honesty around death would help. It’s fine to be sad, or angry and it’s about time we acknowledged that these things are shit and stopped expecting people to just bounce back from them, unchanged.
The other thing that was wrong with this film is that it was very slow. Tom Hanks couldn’t have spoken any slower if he tried. At one point in the film he has a one minute silence in a restaurant, which also goes silent. The cinema followed suit. I can tell you that a minute is a very long time for nothing to happen in a film.
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