About a decade-and-a-half ago, my wife and I went to the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Belgium. Originally opened as a showcase for the spoils the Belgian royal family brought back from its colony in Africa, in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, it was recast as a sort of meta-museum.
There were displays of native artifacts and taxidermized African wildlife on the main floor, close to what it might have looked like decades prior. And a level down, there were rooms filled with plunder, including one with scores of elephant skulls. Patrons were allowed to wander in both spaces, and in so doing come to grasp, in some small way, the rapacious mindset of colonialism. Indeed, you learn more about the toll of colonialism than you do about Central Africa in the 19th century.
Watching To Kill a Mockinbird in the 21st century is quite a bit like strolling the halls of the Royal Museum. The film gazes back to Depression-era Alabama in its own unflinching way, and yet it is just as much of an artifact of how Hollywood in the 1960s related to the Civil Rights movement that was cresting at the time of its production and release.
That’s an assessment rendered with as little judgment as possible. I don’t wish to apply a purely 21st-century lens to this film - to drone on about which characters are being “centered” and why that might be problematic - because it is uncharitable, uninteresting, and Roger Ebert has already covered this ground better than I ever could. It is a fact of the film, and maybe the most obvious one when viewing it in 2024. Scout and Jem and Atticus Finch are unquestionably our vantage point. The narration of an older Scout makes this quite explicit, but the side-plot-that’s-not with Boo Radley and even the camera angles, all staged upward to make every adult loom that much larger, do their part as well.
Spatially, To Kill a Mockingbird trains our gaze up because it is a story told from a child’s perspective. Emotionally, it has us stuck in the middle. The Finches are pitted between the community they are nominally a part of - the poor whites who barter goods for legal services - and the cause of justice, which Atticus embraces in his defense of the wrongfully accused Tom Robinson.
This moral no man’s land explain completely the weird vibes of the film at its conclusion. Boo Radley hides, absurdly, behind a door in the Finch house, not wanting to be noticed and yet unmissable, and so it is with this film. Standing still and silent is not enough to not loom over everything. Atticus is interested in justice and jurisprudence for his client, and yet it is him (and Scout and Jem) preventing a lynching and him receiving a guard of honor of sorts after his unsuccessful defense of Tom.
Gregory Peck’s performance as Finch is perhaps the most enduring piece of this film. Peck’s Atticus Finch approaches the Platonic ideal of a crusading lawyer, his wavy hair and horn-rimmed glasses and stern, sober, deep voice setting the standard for every Perry Mason and Matlock and Law and Order legal eagle that would follow.
What’s not so enduring is just about everything else. Much of that is to be expected from a film released in 1962 that depicts a more backward time and place. And it doesn’t neuter its value. Indeed, it makes sense of a bizarre ending in which the characters try to talk themselves in to justice being done even as the justice system has been shown to be such a spectacular failure.
To Kill a Mockingbird is about a man who knows right from wrong but can’t figure out how to instill it in anyone but his own children. So it was in 1962 as white Hollywood settled on what was right and wrestled with how - or even if - it could make things right.