Adapting a book into a film is a tricky business. Stray too far from the source material and you have readers coming at you with torches and pitchforks. Stay too true to the text and you risk having a bad movie; not everything translates, after all. But trying to have it both ways is by far the worst choice. Unfortunately, that’s the choice made when To Kill A Mockingbird was made into a film.
It’s not that there isn’t any good in the film version. To the contrary, some things it does quite well. The problem, I suppose, is that I finished the book less than a week before I saw the film, making it nigh impossible to keep from comparing the two.
What surprises me the most is how much of the film is explicitly about the Robinson trial, while so much of the book isn’t. The gentle changes and seemingly digressive life lessons of the novel can’t be accommodated in a two-hour film, so many of them are excised.
Some of the changes were reasonable and well-considered, such as the deletion of Aunt Alexandra and Miss Rachel and moving the role of Dill’s aunt to Miss Stephanie though I probably would have gotten rid of Dill as well. And painful as it was to lose them, I understand the loss of the trip to Calpurnia’s church, Miss Maudie’s fire, and Christmas at Finch’s Landing. Compressing the entire affair to less than a week makes sense too.
Truth is, I would have probably cut more. As I say, the biggest issue that I have with the film version is that it tries to have it both ways. I would’ve gladly applauded a film that tried to keep the spirit of the novel while creating most of the scenes out of whole cloth.
But in To Kill A Mockingbird, most of the scenes are shown almost verbatim, and that’s a problem. Dialogue that reads well on the page doesn’t always work on the screen, speechifying is more easily hidden when it’s couched within descriptive passages, and some sections, their context removed with other excised scenes, seem out of place and unnecessary. The shooting of the rabid dog comes to mind, as does Scout’s fight on her first day of school.
So the film version of To Kill A Mockingbird pales in comparison with the book. The good news is that it’s not all bad. The film works best when it gets completely away from the book. For example, the scene with Jem sitting in the car outside the Robinson’s home was especially moving. Jem sees a young black boy through the window, both of them knowing that they live in different worlds, when Bob Ewell appears outside the car. It’s a moving moment, one that wouldn’t have worked in print, but is perfectly at home here.
Another moving scene is near the beginning of the film, with Atticus tucking Scout into bed. For the first and final time, the children’s mother is mentioned and Scout, too young to remember her, tries to wrap her head around who this woman was. In a move only possible in cinema, the camera pans from the children’s bedroom window to Atticus sitting on the porch listening to Jem dreamily answer Scout’s questions about their dead mother, his wife. Was she nice? Was she pretty? Did she love us? Did we love her?
The climactic scene presented a special challenge to the film crew. In the book, it wasn’t clear during the fight who attacked the children, or who saved them, or whether Jem was dead or alive. But without Scout’s point of view, the scene could have been hamstrung by giving the audience too much information too soon. Pulling the camera in, showing limbs but not their owners, hearing the sounds of the fight without the visual blow-by-blow effectively ramps up the tension and saves the scene. Very well done.
And then there’s Boo. Put simply, the entire film, warts and all, was worth it to see Robert Duvall shrink into the corner in Jem’s bedroom. A caged animal, hair a disheveled shock of white, the sullen face, the sad eyes. Boo on film is exactly Boo in my head, and that doesn’t happen often. Hard to believe that this was Duvall’s first major role on the big screen.
And so the film ends, as does the review. Overall, it’s a good film. Not as good as it could have been, not as good as the book, and not as good as some people say, but good enough that I’ll be seeing it again in a few months.
