A flawless adaptation of a perfect book (spoilers)

Rating: Null/10 (17 January 2001)

To Kill a Mockingbird was the first book I ever connected with fully. I had lost myself in a story before, but never so completely, never with such an emotional response to the characters and their fates. For the past few years my health has stopped me from reading, and this is the book I have missed the most.
Seeing an adaptation of a book you love is always hard, because you have to trade your imagination for that of the director and screenwriter. I know what Scout looks like to me, I know what Jem and Dill and Atticus sound like, I know what it was like to live in Macomb and to be scared of the Radley house. I was nervous watching the movie, hoping the producers would not lose or betray the spirit of the book, but their imagination was mine and everything in their adaptation was near-perfect.
Like the book, the film is narrated by Scout and is played to perfection by Mary Badham. She captures Scout's tomboy spirit wonderfully and is at the absolute centre of the film. It's always refreshing to see a child actor who isn't sickly or over-cute or wooden, and the same can be said for Jem and Dill. Gregory Peck's Atticus was as he should be; quietly idealistic, passionate without really showing it. He won the Oscar for his performance, and while it was probably deserved, the kids outshone the adult cast effortlessly.
It would have been easy for the film to have followed only the trial of Tom Robinson, an African-American charged with the rape of a white woman, but it would have killed the spirit of the story; the trial was just another part of Scout's childhood. She played with Jem and Dill, she saw the trial, she went to school for the first time, and she finally met Boo Radley. This approach gives the movie its quiet, understated morality and gentle dignity that made the book everything it was.
It brings with it the powerful contrast between the innocence of childhood and the uncomfortable realities of the adult world, most famously in the scene where Scout talks to a lynch mob on its way to kill Robinson. It makes these points perfectly, never overstating them, never forcing them down your throat, telling only the truth.
The story's power comes in its refusal to find easy answers, in its willingness to bring tragedy to its characters, and the movie captures this perfectly, with the same kind of understatement. It is really a wonderful adaptation.
Inevitably, some details of the story were left out, but most of the important ones were there, with only the children's growing friendship with Boo Radley given less attention than it may have deserved. That is the only criticism I can offer.
Until I can read again, I'll love this movie as I love the book. It was a peerless adaptation. If you don't love it for its gentle storytelling and quiet, understated idealism, your name is John Grisham and its depths are wasted on you.