Word: atticus
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...three Academy Awards, including Best Actor for Gregory Peck, and earned Mulligan his only Oscar nomination - had an immediate and lasting impact. Back then it provided a Hollywood echo of the civil rights agitation that had roiled the South and seized the nation. But Peck's role as Atticus Finch, a crusading attorney who is also a gentle single dad to his two young kids, had staying power. In 2003 the American Film Institute chose Atticus as the top hero in U.S. movie history. (See TIME's All-Time 100 Best Movies...
...Universal Pictures, the sponsor of To Kill a Mockingbird, wanted the role of Atticus to go to its top star, Rock Hudson, whom Mulligan had directed the year before in the romantic comedy Come September. But Pakula and Mulligan held out for Peck, the screen's flintiest rock of movie rectitude. Lee was in enthusiastic agreement, for she had based Atticus on her lawyer father and saw a kinship between him and Peck. On the first day of shooting she told him, "Gregory, you've got a little potbelly just like my daddy," and Peck replied, "Harper, that's great...
...Robinson (Brock Peters), a black man, has been accused of raping a white woman, and Atticus takes on the case - a perilous assignment in an Alabama town in the 1930s. He offers brilliant arguments, demolishes the opposition, convinces each member of the movie audience...and loses. But Atticus has shown courage by putting his reputation on the line. Later in the film, he embodies a kind of pacifist resistance. The white woman's racist father sees him with some blacks and spits in his face. Atticus, with ferocious dignity, takes out a handkerchief, wipes off the insult and walks away...
...Critics of the movie, most prominently Roger Ebert, say that its emphasis on the white man's burden of nobility betrayed a willful ignoring of Tom Robinson, the real person in peril. Atticus loses face; Tom loses his life, but his case is seen not as his or his race's tragedy but as one step on his lawyer's Calvary. Then the plot shifts to the Finches' eccentric neighbor Boo Radley (Robert Duvall, in his first movie role), and Mockingbird forgets about the black man, unfairly convicted by a racist society, to concentrate on the white...
...never really understand a person," Atticus says, "until you consider things from his point of view. Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it." Tolerance ripening into fascination, and then to empathy: that was Mulligan's strength, especially in his psychological portraiture of the young. You could call him the J.D. Salinger of directors and be grateful that, in his movie heart, he stayed so young so long...