My Father, This Hero...

Rating: 7/10 (30 May 2017)

I wasn't yet the movie fan I am today but the first time I saw the American Film Institute's Top 100 heroes and villains, I could recognize almost every name, I expected a few exceptions but certainly not the number one hero: Atticus Finch, played by Gregory Peck, in the adaptation of Harper Lee's Pulitzer-winning "To Kill a Mockingbird". Seriously, who was that dork who had the nerve to be worthier of the first spot than Indiana Jones or James Bond and that I wasn't even familiar with?
And "To Kill a Mockingbird" kept popping up in every AFI list and even on IMDb Top 250, so it was an emergency case in my watch-list of fresh new movie fan. So, I saw the film and could see what was so heroic about this noble-hearted white knight of the South, who dared to question racism at a time where it was common banality. And he was played by the noblest of all actors: Gregory Peck. I often criticized his acting as wooden but perhaps this is the one instance where it did fit the character and his Oscar wasn't stolen although O'Toole as Lawrence of Arabia, Lemmon in "Days of Wine and Roses" and Lancaster as "Birdman of Alcatraz" had more complex personalities to play with.
But there was something crowd-pleasing in the story of Atticus Finch, something that exceeded the expectations of cinema and satisfied the Hollywood conscience, it was still a time of relative innocence where the problem of racism could only be displayed through a white people centered story. Not that it's a bad thing but I wish the film had kept its original tone, as a story seen from the perspective of a growing precocious tomboy named Scout (Mary Badham), whose perception of her lawyer of a father and of the world of adults is influenced by one of the cases he must handle. "To Kill a Mockingbird" is a childhood story, inspired from Lee's memories of the tired Southern town of Maycomb, but the film carries a child-like innocence that doesn't fit the case.
Scout is a girl spending time jumping, climbing hills and trees with her brother Jem and their friend Dill, inspired by her childhood friend Truman Capote, and she sees her widowed father as a super-figure who has an answer for every question. And it seems that the film has somewhat embraced this creed and made Atticus Finch the hero of this picture, which is puzzling because he's not the focus for the whole first act. But we're supposed to embrace his nobility and optimism because it is obvious the case he must defend is a sham, and it doesn't even take courage but common sense. It's not much Atticus who's noble but the other people who are downright bigots and hateful. It's an insult to intelligence that Robinson is declared guilty despite Finch' invitation for humanism and empathy, but the real heroism would have been to convert them. Finch's aura is one of a preacher, powerful, symbolic but eventually, useless.
I actually enjoyed the film and it's never as good as when it plunges you in the children universe and their interpretation of spooky local stories. Scout is like a little sponge trying to understand and appreciate the world as it comes to her eyes, learning from her father,the meaning of words like 'empathy', and the subplot also involves the identity of Boo Radley, which highlights one of these aspects of childhood when you tend to believe the adults, until you realize that they're somewhat corrupted and unworthy of trust. But when Atticus learns the news about the death of Robinson, I couldn't believe he believed he tried to escape. That the film doesn't even exploit the event and makes it look as it really happened that way, that the Black people would just be passive observers with no capability for action and when the town drunk, evil Ewell, spits on Finch' face, he doesn't flinch, I thought the whole sanctification of Finch was overplayed. A preacher, he might be, but a saint, he wasn't. Maybe in the eyes of her daughter, but at that point, the film was told from the adult perspective, not only it didn't work, but it didn't even match the character.
Finch was genuinely furious during his trial statement, he expected to save his client but he was shot dead in what seems to be obvious lynching, instead of prosecuting the case and serving the cause to the fullest, he accepts the outcome and when he's confronted to Ewell, he takes the spit like Jesus would take a slap. Robsinson was dead at that time, was Finch so perfect that he couldn't even give the guy the punch he deserved, what was to lose anyway? Couldn't one of the black guys do it? No, it had to be the hand of God through the providential Boo Radley (a youngish Robert Duvall) to punish the bad guy as to mystify the whole thing again, and creates some deep symbolism between a sordid case of rape and the local village idiot. An unpunished crime to avenge the first, too much religious symbolism for what should have been a tale from a child's eye.
In the movie "Capote", when commenting about the success of the book, Capote says "I don't know what the fuss is all about". Speaking for myself, I can understand why the film is such a celebrated classic, but it doesn't hold up very well in today's context while the masterpiece from Capote "In Cold Blood" says as much as human nature and vileness as the book and is still relevant today. "To Kill a Mockingbird" is a classic, no doubt about that, but not all classics are supposed to be perfect. Maybe I will find in the book these missing elements of 'perfections' though I trust Capote's opinion on it.