An Epic uniquely American; a Luminous tribute to fatherhood.

Rating: Null/10 (20 February 2000)

This is arguably the finest motion picture ever made about small-town and rural United States, about the Great Depression, about the South and especially, about the goodness of one man in particular. Human nature, with both grandeur and evil contesting, is played out by a perfect cast.
The film is not Harper Lee's novel, but it is the cinematically perfect production of her time, place and people. Fatherhood has never been so perfectly delineated, childhood so perceptively depicted, bigotry so thoroughly skewered and decency so crystalline as in this film. It is a template for "Things as They Ought to Be," once racism is shown to be the stupidity that actually it is.
The story unfolds on a summer day in the South, and folds closed almost a year later, on an Autumn night. Within its borders glisten keepsake items, much as we see in the superb opening credits, each being carefully taken from their place in an old cigar box. And finally, in the closing moments, we connect the title to the basis of this story's morality, as Atticus Finch told it to his son, Jem: "Son ... you must never kill a mockingbird ...."

With Harper Lee's poignant autobiographical novel as a base, Horton Foote has distilled a time and place into a vision. It is a vision worth living up to, and seeing over and over. Every father should be Atticus Finch, every child should live in the simplicity of "Macomb." Elmer Bernstein's singing, haunting score carries the story, rather than covering it, the characters and settings shimmer with truth, and a particular time and place in America is captured and preserved on film.