'Everyone needs to be part of that conversation if we really want to address it, and have some ugly truths come out, and not hide from them.' - 'To Kill a Mockingbird' star GbengaAkinnagbe on his WaPo op-ed and dealing with racism in America in 2019.
Story highlightsGene Seymour is a film critic who has written about music, movies and culture for The New York Times, Newsday, Entertainment Weekly and the Washington Post. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the writer.
Any day now, we're constantly told, books will no longer exist and humankind will depend exclusively on images and tweets to tell its stories. From the latter half of the 20th century all the way through the first 15 years of the 21st, there's been endless chatter predicting the end of printed pages between binders. Or, at least, of their power and influence on people.
And yet, it was through much of this same period of time that a single book telling a slight, yet tender story of childhood, terror and injustice in a small Southern town was asserting its influence upon several generations of readers. Many were so inspired by the moral example set by the book's lawyer-hero that they went to law school.
Excitement, uncertainty in Harper Lee's hometown 02:16Indeed, affection for the book is so abiding and strong that it has apparently withstood last year's controversial publication of Lee's only other novel,"Go Set a Watchman,"a longer, earlier draft of"Mockingbird" in which an older Atticus Finch is depicted as a far less racially tolerant man than he's shown in the earlier novel. Still, that affection is hardly universal.
Kipen: Harper Lee 'let her book speak for her' 04:24Within its celebratory context, Murphy's film deftly isolates the places in the novel that make our hearts bleed most indelibly. There is, for instance, the part where the black people consigned to the courtroom balcony throughout poor Tom Robinson's rape trial rise to their feet as Atticus stalks out alone in defeat.
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