![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
To Kill A Mockingbird
Feb. 14th, 2009 03:37 pmThis is the first time I've seen the movie since sometime in the 90s.
Perhaps it's just that I'm 40 now, and I'm looking at things differently than I used to; I don't know, but I have been feeling a deep twisting of melancholy twisting in my heart as I've watched it. The scene at the courthouse where the lynch mob shows up ... it burns. Not in a bad way, but still. At first Atticus is the model of quiet bravery, refusing to back down and let the mob have its way, but when Scout, Jem and Dil shove through the crowd and join him, there's a moment of terror on Gregory Peck's face that makes it clear that in a moment's flash, Atticus is seeing, in excruciating detail, exactly what is going to happen to his children if he can't find a way to stop them.
When I saw that scene before, I always saw it much the same as how Scout had. She's aware that there's a crowd there, but she doesn't really understand why they're there - it's just a group of men there. When she sees the father of one of her classmates she starts talking to him like it's just a case of two people running into each other. And he looks at her, realises what he came there to do, and he's ashamed, and the men near him wind up feeling it too. In the end, simple human decency breaks the mob.
Also, I don't know that I ever really appreciated exactly how lonely and alone Boo Radley really was.
Just sayin'.
Edit: Oh, god. Just got to the end of Atticus cross-examining May Ellen. Her last speech stabs you in the gut.
Perhaps it's just that I'm 40 now, and I'm looking at things differently than I used to; I don't know, but I have been feeling a deep twisting of melancholy twisting in my heart as I've watched it. The scene at the courthouse where the lynch mob shows up ... it burns. Not in a bad way, but still. At first Atticus is the model of quiet bravery, refusing to back down and let the mob have its way, but when Scout, Jem and Dil shove through the crowd and join him, there's a moment of terror on Gregory Peck's face that makes it clear that in a moment's flash, Atticus is seeing, in excruciating detail, exactly what is going to happen to his children if he can't find a way to stop them.
When I saw that scene before, I always saw it much the same as how Scout had. She's aware that there's a crowd there, but she doesn't really understand why they're there - it's just a group of men there. When she sees the father of one of her classmates she starts talking to him like it's just a case of two people running into each other. And he looks at her, realises what he came there to do, and he's ashamed, and the men near him wind up feeling it too. In the end, simple human decency breaks the mob.
Also, I don't know that I ever really appreciated exactly how lonely and alone Boo Radley really was.
Just sayin'.
Edit: Oh, god. Just got to the end of Atticus cross-examining May Ellen. Her last speech stabs you in the gut.
