Wednesday Movie - To Kill a Mockingbird

It’s a huge treat for my when I pop in a classic movie and end up enjoying it. It’s not as typical an occurrence as you’d think. Like sitting through Strangers on a Train—I’m glad I saw it but I didn’t have fun watching it. Or Giant; I was glad to cross that one off my list, but I watched the clock just as much as I watched the movie. It seems that I’ve adopted the same attitude towards watching a movie as I used to have towards reading a book: you will finish this, goddamn you. Just grit your teeth and plow through it. Don’t get me wrong—most of these Wednesday Movies are films I really wanted to see. This wasn’t one of them. I was overly familiar with the story going in, and Gregory Peck (no matter how deep of voice and cleft of chin) was neither a draw nor a turn on for me. Of course, I was all wrong about this movie. Having now seen it, I’d count it among my favourites.

I loved the kids in this movie; they were just perfectly cast. And I haven’t traced their careers onward through IMDB because I want them to only ever have acted here. They’re simply kid-like kids, not insanely aware of their own precociousness (like that aw-shucks red-afroed kid in Annie), and they’re not Dakota Fanning-style child-savants, they just are. Scout is a perfect tom-boy, Jem is a little man, and Dill is weird-looking and dorkily dressed in a way that seems timeless

And then there’s Atticus. Gregory Peck plays the most perfect hero I’ve ever seen in a movie. He’s the moral compass, and yet he remains strangely realistic. I say this because there isn’t a line that comes out of his mouth that’s not a lesson for the kids or a demonstration of his justness. He is Right, and yet he’s so much more than just a device. On top of this, he’s superdad: he’s sweetly compassionate with his kids, but he’ll never lie to them; and he can make with the law, but he’s also a crack shot with a rifle. The truth telling is probably why you love him best. When asked either an emotionally or intellectually challenging question by his kids, he’d never say, “It’s magic!”

While it’s a story that deals in morality, it isn’t Moral; it’s very real, and the fear and danger in it are honestly come by. There’s the bogeyman fear—Boo Radley’s shadow on the wall while the kids are trespassing—and there are scenes of the kids encountering grown up fears for the first time ever—like when a drunken, violent-looking Bob Ewell shambles slowly towards the car as Jem sits inside, alone. It’s all made real exactly because of the children. They’re kids too young to fully grasp the type of extraordinary man their father is, and they’re the only ones truly shocked when the jury brings back a guilty verdict against Tom Robinson.

Clearly, I loved this movie. It’s one of a very small number of films that almost made me cry. It’s one particular scene early on that gets me, where Scout is talking to Jem about their dead mother just before bed, and the camera pans out the window and over to Atticus on the front porch, who’s hearing it all. ‘Was Mama pretty?’ ‘Uh, huh.’ ‘Was Mama nice?’ ‘Uh, huh.’ ‘Did you love her?’ ‘Yes’. ‘Did I love her?’ ‘Yes.’ Other scenes in other movies that almost got me in the same way: when Joel and Clementine say goodbye as the beach house falls to pieces around them in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. And of course, when Arnie gives the thumbs up as John Conner lowers him into the pit of molten metal at the end of Terminator 2. Man, that last one—I’m getting verklempt just typing the words.