A voice from the past

Rating: 7/10 (14 February 2019)

"To Kill a Mockingbird" is a strange experience viewed with the wisdom of hindsight. It's like two movies grafted together, luckily both being pretty good, but making an uneasy hybrid.
It works best as a coming of age tale, told from the perspective of Scout. I wish the whole movie could just have been that. When the perspective shifts to Atticus Finch, played by Gregory Peck, who won an Oscar for the role, it gets a bit creaky. I think coming-of-age stories are timeless. Treatment of racism, however? That gets old and embarrassing quickly.
It is a testament to the movie's power that it's treatment of the racially motivated false accusation of rape at the movie's centre is not as bad as it might be, but it is still pretty cringe inducing in the way it resolves to make Finch into a noble white hero at the expense of black extras playing characters who should have gotten speaking roles.
The resolution attempts to tie together the coming-of-age story and the legal drama, and is a brilliant resolution for the first, but barely seems to touch the second.
It might have worked in '62, and I think the real reason why people still worship this movie is because it reminds us of a time when these queasy issues could be dismissed without too much thought. It's not adored for its agelessness - on the contrary. It's a time capsule. A reminder of a simpler time.