Spotlight

Spotlight Date: 2-May-10
Spoiler Rating: Medium

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

To Kill a Mockingbird is the rare film that captures what makes its source material great and establishes its own greatness in the process. Harper Lee's book, which I assume is still part of the high school canon, sets the reader down in Depression-era Alabama for a story that feels languid and simple but brims with the heavy stuff of life. The movie too is a study in contrasts: the innocence of childhood and the nastiness of the world, Southern courtliness and Southern prejudice, the best and the worst of men. The first contrast is developed by maintaining the point of view of a girl called Scout and her brother Jem (Mary Badham and Phillip Alford, both well cast) as they witness several harrowing events. Along with schoolyard fisticuffs and the creepy-fun draw of a mentally ill neighbor, their minds are occupied with a criminal trial that grips their small town. A loutish white man (James Anderson) has accused a hardworking black man (Brock Peters) of raping his daughter. While largely ignorant of the social implications of the case, Scout and Jem take an interest because their father, a lawyer, is representing the defendant despite popular outrage focused on the color of the parties involved.

This brave lawyer, Atticus Finch, is the perfect melding of an actor's persona with a role. Gregory Peck displays all of Atticus' qualities on the surface — strength, dignity, kindness, conviction — so it is no wonder that he won an Oscar or that his character was named cinema's greatest hero by the American Film Institute. Yet he is a quiet figure in keeping with the movie's tone. At first Scout and Jem regard him only as their single parent, a beloved but unexceptional fixture of their lives. Part of their journey is realizing what a treasure he is, and on what scale. This realization dawns when he shoots a rabid dog at the request of the sheriff, grows when he faces down a lynch mob with nothing more than calm words, and is cemented when he stands before a packed courthouse and denounces the lies of his client's accusers and the existence of racism itself.

The closing chapter of To Kill a Mockingbird ties the trial's aftermath to the kids' mysterious neighbor for a final message about tolerance. This part skews too Southern Gothic for my taste, but that is Harper Lee's doing and not the movie's. (And admittedly, without Boo Radley I would have missed some enjoyable moments in high school where a friend and I used his name as a comic mantra.) All in all, the story achieves an elegant balance between childhood adventures in a poor Southern town and adult entanglements in cruelty and ignorance, with Atticus Finch as a bulwark between the two. The movie is a classic in its own right, stirring in characterization and powerful in meaning.

Copyright © 2010 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.