![]() It’s a sign that Sorkin would like to do more with her character but feels hemmed in by the book. ![]() Empathy is a weak defense against murderous, irrational hatred.Īn anachronistic note enters Sorkin’s script when Atticus and Calpurnia start throwing around the term “passive-aggressive” to describe her disapproving attitude. (The Ku Klux Klan is made up of the same folks who shop at the hardware store on Saturday and fill the pews on Sunday.) Atticus’ insistence that you can’t judge a person till you crawl inside his skin and walk around in it is simplistic. Calpurnia (played by the formidable LaTanya Richardson Jackson) stays mostly within the bounds of a black housekeeper of the period, but she lets Atticus know that his faith in the town is misplaced.Įvil exists in polite, sleepy Maycomb. She’s desperate to understand Atticus’ journey from idealist to realist, as though the answer to all the societal questions bedeviling her lie in figuring out this one mystery.Ītticus’ belief in the inherent goodness in people is challenged by characters who are given new agency by Sorkin. But there’s something about his death that just doesn’t make sense.Īs the play jumps back in time, it becomes clear that it’s not the incident itself but the coverup that Scout finds so haunting. She understands he was seeking revenge for the courtroom humiliation Atticus inflicted on him and his daughter Mayella (a credibly intense Erin Wilhelmi), the young woman who falsely accuses Tom of raping her. One matter she keeps coming back to is how Bob Ewell (an appropriately slithering Frederick Weller) could have fallen on his knife during his attack on Jem and her. ![]() Even minor assertions are contested by Jem (Will Pullen) and Dill (Gideon Glick), as Scout retrospectively ponders the momentous events that almost cost Jem and her their lives. Perhaps that insight is behind the decision to wrestle away some of Scout’s storytelling authority. But one thing remains constant: our shortsightedness. Rereading Lee’s Pulitzer Prize winner in 2018 is a vastly different experience from when I first encountered the book in the early 1980s. Lee herself was divided about her own book, as revealed by the controversial 2015 publication of “Go Set a Watchman,” an abandoned earlier work that shows the characters of “Mockingbird” in a harsher light. Readers have no choice but to approach the material through the prisms of their own histories. “To Kill a Mockingbird” tells a fundamental story about the way race and justice are inextricably bound in America. It’s a stirring, thoroughly original portrayal of a character too shadowed with doubt to be heroic yet too determined to do the right thing not to maintain our admiration, even if at times he seems hopelessly naïve.īut what was once a bildungsroman about a rowdy, independent-minded tomboy whose moral education involves coming to terms with the hypocrisies and willful blindness of the adults around her in Depression-era Alabama is now the story of an idealistic attorney forced to confront the limitations of the law as an instrument of justice in a racist society.Ĭontroversy, in any event, is unavoidable with this landmark American novel. The role that Gregory Peck turned into a moral beacon in the classic 1962 film is played by Jeff Daniels with a shambling, heavyhearted ambivalence. Scout (a vivid Celia Keenan-Bolger) retains her narrator role to a degree, though the story’s emphasis shifts to her widower father, Atticus Finch, a lawyer who has agreed to defend Tom in a tinderbox case he knows will have dangerous repercussions for all involved. ![]() ![]() Legal and ethical questions predominate in Sorkin’s retelling. ![]()
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