To Kill a Mockingbird

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD       A             

USA  (129 mi)  1962  d:  Robert Mulligan

I remember when my daddy gave me that gun. He told me that I should never point it at anything in the house; and that he'd rather I'd shoot at tin cans in the backyard. But he said that sooner or later he supposed the temptation to go after birds would be too much, and that I could shoot all the blue jays I wanted—if I could hit 'em; but to remember it was a sin to kill a mockingbird. Well, I reckon because mockingbirds don't do anything but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat people's gardens, don't nest in the corncrib, they don't do one thing but just sing their hearts out for us.

—Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck)

One of the most beloved of all American films and certainly one of the best movies ever made that continues to have such a powerful impact on children, shot during a time when the races were still bitterly divided in this country, this is a brilliant adaptation by Horton Foote of the legendary Harper Lee novel taking place during the Depression in a small town in Alabama, particularly notable because it’s seen through the eyes of several young children who guide us through their very young and still innocent worlds.  It’s given a touch of magic by the superb performances by Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, in the role of his lifetime as a single father and attorney whose patience and virtues won him both an Academy Award and the distinction by the American Film Institute that voted him the greatest hero in any American film 100 Greatest Heroes and Villains - AFI, and also Mary Badham as his 6-year old daughter Scout who simply couldn’t be more good naturedly precocious and actually steals one of the best scenes in the film when her overt friendliness shames a group of adults hellbent on lynch mob justice.  Meticulously recreating the close-knit intimacy where an entire world is seen through one city block, we follow the very impressionable Scout and her older brother Jem (Phillip Alford) as they collect precious gifts found in a tree and lull away their endless summers with a visiting friend Dill (John Megna).  We see them rush out the door for their first day of school, then have to explain to her father why she gets into fights, invite friends over to visit, read bedtime stories, have serious talks on the porch, or peek into the mysterious universe of the haunted house next door inhabited by the unseen, ghostly evil countenance of Boo Radley (Robert Duvall’s first role), a delightfully overshy creation by the author, who based the part of Dill (John Megna), the curiously inquisitive friend visiting for the summer, on her real life neighbor Truman Capote.  Harper Lee and Truman Capote have been forever linked together by the biographical film adaptations of CAPOTE (2005) and INFAMOUS (2006). 

The film beautifully interweaves Southern style and manners with the history and customs of the time, including reflections looking back from an older Scout, read by an unseen narrator Kim Stanley.  When Atticus is chosen by the judge to represent a black man charged with raping a white girl, we are slowly introduced to a darker world that exists in the world beyond their block, where according to Jem, this trial is the biggest thing the town’s ever seen.  The only spots left in the courtroom are in the balcony where all the seats are filled by blacks, where the two kids sit next to a black preacher, Reverend Sykes (Bill Walker).  Presented relatively close to real time, Brock Peters plays Tom Robinson, the accused, with a quiet sense of nobility, where it soon becomes clear to viewers that he’s being framed, but in that era there were few whites who could even conceive taking a black man’s word over a white.  Perhaps the most powerful scene in the film, even more dramatic than Peck’s final summation, is his quiet walk out of the empty courtroom where none of the blacks in the balcony have left, where all remain standing.  Reverend Sykes has to politely remind Scout by her birth name, “Miss Jean Louise. Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your father's passing.”  While the film deals with broad subjects of good and evil, both in the courtroom and in that mysterious house next door, it does so in such a lyrical manner that one can’t help but be moved by the very simplicity of the presentation onscreen. 

The music by Elmer Bernstein and cinematography by Russell Harlan matches the gorgeous look of the film, which retains its power even after the passage of time.  The shift into the adult world of the courtroom never loses its impact on the lives of the children, who are the eyes and ears of the still undeveloped moral conscience of the next generation overseeing what constituted small town justice when they grew up.  The focus remains real people leading ordinary lives where they have to come to terms with the changing world around them, as it still reverberates decades later in their adult life.  Told with a poetic conviction, this has the exact same impact on the viewer, as each subsequent generation that views this film recalls its quiet, understated tone, as personified by Peck’s dignified restraint, and will continue to grapple with similar moral questions in their own lives.  Because of just how brilliant it is, it’s quite likely the film will have a greater impact than the Pulitzer prize winning book.  In reality, as of this date, Harper Lee (Harper Lee - Biography), who was herself an unruly tomboy who fought on the schoolground and talked back to her teachers (see The Big Read), continues to live in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, with her older sister Alice (15 years her elder), currently the oldest practicing attorney in the state.  An interesting comparison between her own life and the book is explored here:  Reading: Bridge to a Wider World - Harper Lee.

The Help

THE HELP                  B-                   

USA  (146 mi)  2011  d:  Tate Taylor

What if you don't like what I got to say 'bout white people?           
— Aibileen Clark (Viola Davis)

At a time when racism is rearing its ugly head with a black President, with all the fringe groups aligning themselves to denounce the man with a feverish tone of racist hostility, this is an era when all too many whites once again believe they are entitled to the best jobs, the best schools, and the best neighborhoods, allowing blacks to fend for themselves in the criminally infested, ghetto jungles of America, which so many in America believe is where they belong, or in prisons, as they’re too afraid to believe in a world of diverse humanity.  The promise of hope for a cultural shift in the 60’s died a quick death with the selfish indulgence of the 70’s when racism was once again quickly swept under the rug, where the perennial problem is out of sight, out of mind, as so many whites continue to live separate and apart from any significant black population.  So long as there remains such a significant cultural divide based on racial segregation and unequal opportunities, the age old disparities between races still exist, where a recent study by the Pew Research Center suggests the median net worth of white Americans ($113, 149) is twenty times more than for black households ($5677), a number that has grown staggeringly worse due to the recession, where blacks have been hit harder than any other group, as they were the poorest and most vulnerable to begin with.  Generation after generation, election after election, this picture of gross inequity has remained unchanged, and if anything, despite many ballyhooed social advances, the economic disparity has only gotten worse.        

A major complaint against Kathryn Stockett's 2009 bestselling novel The Help was that a white woman raised by a black nanny hired by her affluent parents had no business writing a Civil Rights era novel from the perspective of black maids, but then again, no one told Mark Twain or William Faulkner that they couldn’t write stories about “Negroes” in their time.  Quite simply, there’s nothing wrong with white people telling their stories, sharing their views of history, so it’s not really who’s telling the story, but the story itself that matters and what truths are revealed.  Certainly the first obstacle this movie has to overcome is what’s so fascinating about a film depicting black women in the most demeaning and subservient positions?  And the second is overcoming the perception that this is an Oprah endorsed best seller released as a sanitized Disney film.  In the final analysis, the film never overcomes these objections, as the rich white women living in the aristocratic Southern plantations all have black maids, every single one, where most have been handed down in the family since slavery days, where families continued to feel a sense of ownership with their “help” well past the 1950’s.  So in this movie, where the men have scant presence (sorry Brian), the white women “owners” are almost all portrayed as vile and one-dimensional while the black maids reflect the more complex side of humanity.  This stereotypical depiction prevents the movie from ever rising above such a narrow view, as the characters themselves just won’t allow it, remaining pigeonholed by the historic limitations of the script.   

While this is adapted from a literary work with a largely terrific cast, perhaps the best way to approach this film is viewing it as one might a play, complete with a revolving stage and a plethora of characters to discover, where part of the fun is relishing the colorful characters observed in such close range, each seen in light of their own history, awash in the sins of the era.  It seems like the current generation views the 60’s through the prism of the TV show Mad Men, where television replaces the void of their own shallow understanding of history, suggesting a culture of few who read anymore.  In that sense, it’s better to view history through the eyes of someone who was actually there, even if they were not a major player.  While Kathryn Stockett wrote the novel, the director Tate Taylor was one of her best friends growing up, both white, perhaps not the ablest of writers or directors, but they offer a shared understanding, so this plays out with the intimacy of a personal diary, rich in the meticulous detail of the powers of close observation.  Would anyone complain for one second if we were eavesdropping on a conversation between Southern white neighbors Truman Capote and Harper Lee?  Granted, this isn’t To Kill a Mockingbird, a novel that made no attempt to interject history, but instead thrived on the magnificent details of Southern life.  Here it is the suffocatingly restricted characters of the maids that through the advancements of the Civil Rights movement eventually learn to appreciate some additional elbow room.   

Set in Jackson, Mississippi, in the pre-Civil Rights years of the early 1960s, the mood is soured by hearing the blatantly racist views directed towards their own hired help (while they are standing there!) reflected in the ordinary conversations of women’s social gatherings, led by the politically aspiring Queen Bee influence of Bryce Dallas Howard’s Hilly Holbrook, a woman of high social standing who prefers to keep blacks in their place, completely separate from whites, except, apparently, to raise their children, as if white hands are too good to be soiled by handling their own children.  What really hurts the expansion of the mood is the either all good or all evil treatment of the characters, where a few slip between the cracks, namely Hilly’s mother, the deliriously crazy Sissy Spacek, and the social outcast Jessica Chastain, apparently risen from trailer trash, who is treated as if she has leprosy, where even the blacks won’t get near her.  These exaggerations allow wonderful comic portrayals, as there’s plenty of humor to be found in this film, as otherwise it would be smothered in the singleminded earnestness of the do-gooder lead character, Emma Stone as Skeeter, a young white woman from a wealthy family who has just returned from college, an aspiring writer who decides to set the tilted world back on its axis by writing the stories of the black women who work as hired help, showing, as she puts it, “the other side.”  Two characters in particular are allowed to shine, Viola Davis as Aibileen, the heart and soul of the film, a devout Christian who believes God offers more than the life she’s been handed, bitter after losing her own grown son in an industrial accident, where economic circumstances ironically forced her to raise rich white children instead of her own.  The other is Octavia Spencer as Minny Jackson, Aibileen’s best friend, who steals every scene she’s in, a dizzyingly funny comic delight, a woman not afraid to speak her mind, a prized role in any movie.  It’s interesting that Disney would get into the business of promoting a movie with social issues, but their own squeaky clean image restrictions prevent them from taking a more complicated, in-depth, and realistic approach, where the real horrors of growing up in the Jim Crow South are intentionally kept offscreen.