To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

To kill a mockingbird (dir. R Mulligan) has the visual style of Italian neorealism and plenty of time to explore the warped aspect of American life. As you can probably tell, I liked this film (I haven’t read the book yet). The story takes place in Alabama during the poverty-stricken years of the Depression. Interestingly, the protagonists are children, and for all the mannerisms of child actors, these make quite an impression (which means that I didn’t spend the entire film moaning about poor acting). The acting of these children exudes a kind of bold energy that is a quite rare occurence on mainstream film. Scout and Jem live with their father, who is a lawyer. Their life take a sudden change as their father defends the case of a black man, accused of having raped a white woman. The film chooses an exemplary path in not going for the big drama, but rather focusing on the everyday life of its young character, their play, their fights, their fears. This is all-important for the emotional resonance of the film: the characters are contextualized; they are not just mechanically acting out the essential turns of the story and uttering some dramatic bunch of lines. In distinction to many Hollywood films, the locations play an important role, it is not only the backdrop of action, but rather we come to understand the characters through the way they interact with the surrounding world (a tree, a spooky house, a wheel, a busy street, the trusting father). And I mean, this is all the more rewarding if we compare the film to most adaptations of books into the big screen. This film breathes with its own lungs. Of course, what the film and the book are remembered for is the depiction of racism. Admittedly, this is more a film about white people’s reaction to racism than it is a film about what effects racism has on those primarily affected by it. Of course, complaints can be made: Atticus, the lawyer, is idealized into the gentle white man with a robust sense for social justice. Or is it fair to talk about idealization here? Well, that, I think, depends on how the story is interpreted. One main point of the film is to show how the protagonists mature into social awareness, exchanging eerie bogeymen for real evildoers and bigots. But still, the portrait of Atticus runs the risk of becoming gratifying, of smouldering its subject with praising the Just White Man for doing his best. The black actors in the movie seem an excuse for Gregory Peck's Atticus to shine. I cannot help think this to be a bit disturbing. A problem that seems related to this is the tendency to make caricatures out of the Southern bigots.