One Minute

Take a minute to watch this video.

Watching the movie A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood I was part of a really important scene, perhaps one of the most beautiful scenes I had the pleasure of seeing in a movie. Something unique and particular struck me in words as well as in acting, in the set design, in the looks of the actors, principal and not, and in the light; all perfectly captured in just over a minute.

In this scene Fred Rogers (Tom Hanks) asks the journalist writer Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys) commissioned by his newspaper to write a profile of the aforementioned children’s programme presenter, to take a minute to think of all the people who have dedicated love to him. One minute, one minute, made of silences and glances, snapshots and immobility. A single minute to define an entire film, to give a categorical certainty to that love that until the end does not convince us at all, to that external and inner peace that almost immobilizes us by making us blind in front of a real character, in life as on the screen. In addition to the great proof of two excellent actors there is the representation perfectly consistent with the testimonies of those who knew Fred Rogers, of those who met them and crossed them and saw us tenderness, love, humanity and a solemnity given only by the firmness of believing that in each of us there is a child still able to feel joy for small moments like those that last a minute.

It’s all here the solution of life takes sixty seconds to understand how all the other hours of the day have been lived frantically and how much a minute’s silence watching a movie and letting the main actor look in the car to make sure that I, the spectator sitting on the couch, really took that minute to think about all the people in my life who have dedicated love to me.

And I really did, the movie had taken me literally, and I was waiting for the end to receive the hard news that nothing could be so real and beautiful, and how out of nowhere, with a completely harmless scene of emotions turns out to be pure magic concocting a single moment so personal that it made me realize how important people really were , those true and few people capable of loving unconditionally pointing not to superficiality or semblance but pulling straight towards that feeling that we have left in the darkness from our growth as adults, fragility.

I’m back to being that fragile child who looks at things with other eyes and is not ashamed to do so.