Robert J. Maxwell A commentary on "To Kill A Mockingbird."I'll get the annoying things out of the way first. They begin with that portentous title -- "Fearful Symmetry" -- along with a reading of the whole verse from Blake by a narrator who seems to be imitating Kim Stanley's voice in the original movie. Where's the fearful symmetry? And the narrative itself is a little pompous. Someone is described as having "Promethean intoxication." I have an idea who Prometheus was and I am on a first-name basis with intoxication, but this is overreach.Third, a surprising number of cast, crew, and players are (or were) still alive and were tracked down. None of them claims that "it changed my life forever," thank Bog, but the local folks from Macomb, Alabama, seem to have a rosier view of their lives than an outside ethnographer might. "Oh, I guess a couple of folks kept guns" -- that sort of thing.Finally, one of the principals, Phillip Alford, who was Scout's older brother, Jem, in the movie, seems stuck forever in a binary world that would have fitted nicely into the more reactionary neighborhoods of Macomb. He hated Mary Badham and tried to kill her. And, "how many wise-ass kids do you see on TV today? All of 'em." I wonder how many guns he keeps. Mary Badham, on the other hand, is a pretty evolved lady now. Collin Paxton, the lady who played the faux rape victim, manages to drag in an anachronistic sexual abuse explanation for her character's distress. Mayella Ewell would be on afternoon talk shows today and promoting her ghost-written book: "Abuse, And How To Recover From It." Okay. All that aside -- the pomposity and the self deception and the sentimentality -- this is really pretty well done. It's in black and white, it alternates talking heads with video clips of Monroeville, Alabama, today with still shots of rural Southern towns from the 30s and 40s. The town today is indistinguishable from any smallish town anywhere in the United States. The Mom and Pop stores have disappeared. Gossip and the omnipresence of curious kids act as effective forces of social control. They keep people in line. Now they're gone and you have cops. Neighbors don't help neighbors so much because they have no neighbors. The porches are gone and everyone sits inside, air-cooled and TV-watching.It's enough to make you nostalgic for The Old Days, even though, in those old days, "all disputes were definitely settled on a personal basis." The inference from that quote can be tested by checking the homicide rates by state -- or by county, if you like. You're polite because you'd BETTER be polite. But that culture of honor may be on its way out too. Today, Atticus Finch would be a busy man living in a big white house on a hill overlooking Macomb. There would have to be at least two lawyers in town for that to happen, though. If he were the only lawyer he'd still be entangled in entailments and entrapments. That's an old joke, two lawyers getting richer than just one, but sometimes, Goldurn it, the old ones are the best ones.What's surprising about the film is its balanced approach. Monroeville was a slow, gentle, tolerant little town in which everyone knew his place. And yet the documentary puts racial animosity in a prominent position. And the talking heads aren't there simply to pimp the movie -- that was 36 years ago, after all. Nothing is lost if someone speaks his mind. If Gregory Peck, the noble attorney, and James Anderson, the angry redneck, loathed one another, Peck admits it, just as Jem is honest about hating Scout. And many of the commentators, whether from Hollywood or just locals in Monroeville, have surprisingly perceptive things to say about the movie and the society is reflects.I suppose, as one reviewer has observed, the movie is a bit old fashioned, a morality play. Atticus Finch is saintly. Tom Robinson has never had an impure thought in his life. James Anderson is the incarnation of Beelzebub, The Lord of the Flies. There's never much question of who's right and who's wrong. Yet the documentary, like the movie it examines, tells us something about the rural South in the 1930s that sounds like the truth, if not the whole truth.As a "making-of" companion, it's really superior to most.

Rick-34 In reading through the reviews, I see one reviewer who savaged this documentary. I find this criticism excessive, and would like to temper it a bit.It is true that this documentary is poorly titled, and a bit rambling. But that is hardly the point. "Fearful Symmetry" gives one the chance to see most of the people involved in the creation of the film "To Kill a Mockingbird" discuss the process of making this classic. The interviews with Gregory Peck (Atticus Finch), Robert Mulligan (the director), Horton Foote (the writer), Elmer Bernstein (the composer), Philip Alford (Jem), Mary Badham (Scout), Brock Peters (Tom Robinson) and Robert Duvall (Boo Radley) are all priceless. It is quite a marvel that so many of the main people involved were still alive 36 years later. Especially in the light of Peck's recent passing, I think we should be less critical of the rambling nature of the documentary. I learned many things about the writing of the book, its translation to a screenplay, and the various difficulties in transforming a screenplay to a movie that has become an American classic. What more should one wish from a documentary of this nature?

tedg Spoilers herein.Here is a textbook case of the different forces that shape books, films and TeeVee shows.This was a wonderful book because of the way observation was managed and the language was rooted in place. There were lots and lots of literary tricks pulled, most of which enrich the experience. It still is worth reading. It expands the mind.From that, Hollywood extracted a film. All of the literary devices are lost as a matter of necessity. In their place are a few strong performances and some artsy salon photography of the kids. The focus of the film is now not in its texture, but in the story itself. Instead of the racial injustice being a device to move the narrative, we have it at the only focus.Well, that was good enough in its day because of the role film plays in shaping the national consciousness. This film went a very long way toward defining a national morality concerning at least Southern-style racism. But the context has changed, and Peck's style of acting in particular is now unpopular -- and somewhat annnoying -- in films of substance. It is now a simple morality play, with some skill but little art, not entirely unlike `Gentleman's Agreement.'Now along comes this TeeVee show which is the third abstraction in the series (real life, the book, the film, now this). The point of this is pretty diffuse, with lots of elements that don't make sense together. For instance, we have a wholly incongruous and inapt title and epigram, several remembrances of place (with films of the location, interviews of old-timers and voiceovers from the book), interviews with all the key participants in the film, some footage of the civil rights struggle with rambling observations by an articulate black lawyer, and a few other talking heads on various elements of the book or film. The whole thing is hopelessly unfocused and it is a scandal that it is carried in the same basket as the book or even the film. The film, if overly blunt, was at least coherently focused. But you see, with TeeVee stuff it doesn't matter, a rude and disturbing fact that places the viewers of this mush in precisely the space as the trailer trash originally targeted. That's because the viewers are not prompted to think at all, we are told what the message is. What the lesson is. What the moral is. What every normal person would think.Naturally, racism is bad. But look at what this TeeVee thing does. The real problem is how societies become whole and live by mechanisms that seem to demand stereotypes, something the book takes headon. Stereotyping is the problem, which in the South settled on race, or rather racially-defined class. Now look what this show does: it substitutes one evil stereotype for another. The blacks are noble, the (roughly) equally impoverished white trash are given all the traits originally assigned to the blacks -- they are dirty, inarticulate, liars, sexual deviants, violent, chummily conspiratorial.So while giving us the standard sixth grade civics lesson, it reinforces the basic problem of parading stereotypes and reinforcing the mechanism of stereotyping. That's the evil of TeeVee: the medium demands it. A worse example is the `Paradise Lost' TeeVee `documentary.' It similarly discusses a purported legal injustice that it says happened because of the stereotyping of the stupid white folks involved. It similarly exploits its own stereotypes by pounding home the stereotype of the people they accuse of stereotyping. It similarly takes its title from a classical text with no connection whatsoever, but which gives the illusion of an Olympian vision and moral neutrality.Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 4: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.

tim_bracken Fearful Symmetry is an approximately 90 minute long documentary about the classic film, "To Kill a Mockingbird." The documentary is excellent, blending interviews with still photographs and excerpts from the film. Kiselyak has interviewed practically every living person associated with the 1962 film, including writer Horton Foote, producer Alan Pakula, composer Elmer Bernstein, director Robert Mulligan, and stars Gregory Peck, Mary Badham, and Phillip Alford. Sadly absent from the documentary is Harper Lee herself. However, according to an essay written by Kiselyak, Ms. Lee spoke with him at length regarding the documentary, and arranged for the participation of people who knew her and her father (the basis for Atticus Finch) years ago.The documentary delves wonderfully into the making of the film, but also into the social and historical background underlying the novel and the film. In handling the latter, Kiselyak presents the voices of both scholars and people living through those times.Those wishing to watch this enjoyable documentary need only rent or buy the Collector's Edition of the "To Kill a Mockingbird" DVD.