“What do you do with the mad you feel?”
It’s the question that Tom Hanks’ Fred Rogers asks the audience in “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood”. I’ve never been too attached to the real Mr Rogers, and yet that question, centred in the narrative of Marielle Heller’s empathetic film, seemed to reverberate backwards and forwards through so much of 2019 – cinematically, politically, culturally. It’s not new; that anger, that “mad,” has been the backbone of art for millennia. Yet, in compiling my favourite moments in film of the year, I kept thinking of how that mad we feel seemed central to so much of what filmmakers and characters were showing us this year.
There’s a moment in Greta Gerwig’s “Little Women” where Jo March, horrified at her reaction to a fight with her sister, turns to her mother (Marmee) for guidance. The beatific Marmee is so perfect, how could Jo possible learn to be more like her? “I’m angry every day, Jo,” she says. And like Jo, we are sceptical. She’s never shown it. Instead, she explains, she uses it to fuel her work, doing good to deal with the mad. It’s a worn missive in its way, but Gerwig respects these characters enough to treat the banalities of their lives with empathy and clarity.
