Nosh 115: 'Won't You Be My Neighbor?' & 'Sicario: Day of the Soldado'

By David Elliott

     

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, fresh each Friday.

APPETIZER: Reviews of Won’t You Be My Neighbor? and Sicario: Day of the Soldado.

Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

You cynics, snarkers, trolls and lipoffs came to sneer – but then Won’t You Be My Neighbor? gave you Fred Rogers. You saw the glow of kindly hope, the radiant decency of Fred. Born in the hopeful time of Calvin Coolidge (1928), gone in the grim time of Bush II (2003), Fred was a Coolidge kinda fella, if not Calvinist. He liked polite, subdued speech and silences, favored ties, sneakers and sweaters, was “a lifelong Republican” (unlikely that would have lasted into our new world of federal kidnapping). I came along too early to get the benefit of Fred’s public TV show for children, having sprouted my antenna in the Roy Rogers era (Dale was a dear). Later, catching bits of the show, I wondered if Fred might have a skeleton in his sweater drawer, something that could quake his nice image (like the dopey scandal that swacked my own kids’s TV favorite, Pee-wee Herman).

In a vintage clip, interviewer Tom Snyder flat-out asks Fred if he is “square, you know, straight.” Fred amiably confirms that he is (later seconded by his delightful wife Joanne, their grown kids, and the regulars on Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood). Oh, there was that time when black cast member Francois Clemmons nearly came out as gay,  until Rogers stopped him (worried about losing sponsors in syndication). Fred soon came round, and he and Francois had already spiked public pool segregationists, by bathing their feet together on camera. In his gentle, nurturing way, Rogers also addressed bullying, lies, sickness, death, solitude, divorce, assassinations and other cruel intrusions on the magical but insecure world of childhood. His sweetness was genuine, not vanilla pabulum.

Morgan Neville’s fine tribute documents, without preaching (Presbyterian minister Fred did not preach), the host’s empathetic genius with kids, in whom the film is rich. Rogers served their need for understanding, never bossy or judgmental. An intuitive psychologist and educator, Fred cut deep into childhood’s underbrush with his soft machete: kindness. Today’s kids, quickly hooked on cellphones and violent games, might not respond to Rogers as did many 20^th century youths. Starting with flimsy sets and simple puppets, Fred stayed loyal to the homely format, never becoming ironic or sophisticated. He became, for millions, a caring friend, good neighbor and wise uncle.

Though loved as a child, Fred was a shy chub with few friends, rescued by music, then religion. In a terrific clip, Rogers saves PBS’s funding with simple, deep remarks that moved the skeptical committee chairman, Sen. John Pastore. Loathing violence, Fred probably didn’t like the slapstick mayhem (seen in the film) of SCTV’s classic skit “Battle of the PBS Stars” (Martin Short as Fred, boxing John Candy as Julia Childs). Although badly shaken by the 9-11 tragedy, Mr. Rogers never lost his faith that the world should be made fit for children. As far as he could, he did.

Sicario: Day of the Soldado

The lessons of Fred Rogers seem so far away from the Tex-Mex border, where in our brave new world migrant kids are being torn from their families and suspended in a juvenile hell of trapped fear and boredom. For all those who get down to McAllen or Brownsville for caring protest, many more will crave the blood-sausage burrito of Sicario: Day of the Soldado (which visits McAllen). Sequel to 2015’s Sicario, it stars a virile pair of cojones grandes who man-up the story. Cojón uno: Matt Graver, federal black-op honcho and expert killer, bulging that blockhouse blend of muscle and gravel that is Josh Brolin. Cojón dos: Alejandro, supreme renegade sicario (hit man), storming through hot action without ever losing the deadly gaze of Benicio Del Toro. His half-hooded eyes suggest a primal wolf waking from a primeval siesta.

There are squirmy tendrils of tabloid politics in the linkage of drug cartels, gangs running migrants across the border, crazed Yemeni jihadists, Somali pirates, vicious cops and (with a Trumpean blast of subtlety) the threat of Mexico as Our Enemy Neighbor (how will this play with the new, nationalist government in Mexico City?). Emily Blunt is now sadly gone, and Catherine Keener and Matthew Modine are used as mere decals. What saves Sicario from being just another warehouse of exploding bull flesh is not Italian director Stefano Sollima (efficient), nor the imagery of Dariusz Wolski (excellent). It is that chief scripter Taylor Sheridan, who did No. 1 and also wrote and directed the tough but always human Wyoming thriller Wind River, ropes the action sequences around the fate of two teens.

The boy who becomes a guide for desperate migrants remains mostly plot cartilage, touching but generic. It’s an abducted girl, the cartel princess Isabela (Isabel Moner), at first cocky and then awfully vulnerable, whose survival bond with Del Toro’s Alejandro gives the film its true tension of danger. In a remarkable episode they find refuge with a deaf man’s family, dignified even in raw poverty. It gives the story moral gravity, a still point amid the mayhem. In this ramped-up world where every stinkin’ badge can be bent, and every soiled killer is like a buzzard pecking his own feral heart, the sad-eyed sicario  and the frightened heiress are substantially alive (even if Alejandro’s survival at one point is highly questionable). Del Toro and Moner provide, though in a simpler way, an emotionally loaded core like Kevin Kline and young Cesar Ramos did in 2007’s scary cross-border drama Trade. 

      

SALAD: A List

Outstanding Movies About TV Luminaries
With stars and year: The Great Man (José Ferrer, 1956), A Face in the Crowd (Andy Griffith, 1957), Network (Peter Finch, 1976), The King of Comedy (Jerry Lewis, 1982), Tootsie (Dustin Hoffman, 1982), Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (Paul Reubens, 1984), Mr. Saturday Night (Billy Crystal, 1992), Quiz Show (Ralph Fiennes, 1994), To Die For (Nicole Kidman, 1995), Auto Focus (Greg Kinnear, 2002), Anchorman: Legend of Ron Burgundy (Will Farrell, 2004), Good Night, and Good Luck (David Strathairn, 2005), Hollywoodland (Ben Affleck, 2006), Talk to Me (Don Cheadle, 2007), Frost/Nixon (Michael Sheen, Frank Langella, 2008), Julie & Julia (Meryl Streep, 2009).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson Welles loved actors, as a general rule, but he often found movie stars, in the full, flapping flight of their stardom, amusing. As when appearing in a film about Marco Polo, shot in Yugoslavia: “Tony Quinn came to town with his own private writer. He played Kubla Khan, who, it turned out in Tony’s authoritative version, was kindly, brave, benevolent, good, handsome and irresistible to women. There was no grace or virtue which was not written into that character! And then he played him like Charlie Chan.” (OW in This Is Orson Welles, by Welles and Peter Bogdanovich.)   

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Grateful nostalgia of a former usher: “In Chicago theaters, hauling heavy cans of film to lofty booths, I felt like a young priest elevating the holy host. I must thank two ‘high priests.’ World War II veteran and dapper martinet Samuel Levin (1912-1995) expertly managed the big State-Lake Theater. Five blocks away, veteran and cheerful cinephile Bruce Trinz (1917-2011) owned and ran the smaller Clark Theater, where each day’s new double-bill of vintage movies lured sunrise pilgrims, tired shoppers, students, buffs, loners, daters, seniors, cruisers, nighthawks. For every picture, Bruce wrote a rhymed couplet in his monthly calendar, like the one for White Heat with Cagney: A grim human bomb / Who worshipped his Mom!” (From the intro to my 2016 book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

A great movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

In White Heat, psycho James Cagney is visited by his hellish mother, Margaret Wycherly. (Warner Bros., 1949; director Raoul Walsh, cinematographer Sidney Hickox.)

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