Film · Prime Video · 1962

To Kill a Mockingbird

Keep it. Courage is a man going to the courthouse when he knows the verdict.

Atticus is not a speech. He is a father who will not take a case he does not mean, and who makes Scout and Jem live next to the consequence. Tom's dignity is not a lesson for white comfort. The film is of its year and still clearer than most of ours about a stacked court. The night on the porch, the rabid dog, the injunction to walk in another person's shoes: these are practical, not decorative.

Watch it, and do not let the warmth of the childhood frame excuse the trial. The childhood is there so you see what a house teaches by what the father will stand up in public and say.

The eight

Industry
8/10
Law practiced as a craft, not a performance.
Household
9/10
A father raising children in public.
Piety
5/10
A moral law more than a sermon.
Courage
10/10
He goes, knowing.
Republic
8/10
A town on trial along with a man.
Temperance
7/10
No grandstanding.
Truth
9/10
The accusation is refused.
Stewardship
9/10
The children are the ones being formed, which is the point.

Live historicallyTell the truth about a neighbor even when your street will punish you for it.

Film · Film · 2003

Master and Commander

The closest thing on a screen to the standard itself. A ship is a house with a hull.

Aubrey wants the chase. Maturin wants the natural world, and the wounded men, and the argument. The ship holds both, which is why the film feels like a complete life and most action pictures feel like a trailer. Nobody is ironic about duty. Nobody is rewarded for a mood.

It is a British navy in the Napoleonic years, not a Massachusetts farm, and it still teaches the republican virtues better than most movies set in America: competence, a chain of responsibility, courage that obeys, truth between friends, and a community small enough that every death has a name. If you keep one film for a son, or for yourself on a bad year, make it this one. Then go do something hard, properly, with other people.

The eight

Industry
9/10
Every man aboard has a task. Seamanship is the plot.
Household
8/10
The crew is the household. The captain is a father who can be wrong.
Piety
6/10
Duty stands in for creed, and it is not a small stand-in.
Courage
9/10
Courage here is procedure plus nerve, not a speech.
Republic
8/10
Order, law, and the reason a warship exists. Liberty inside a discipline.
Temperance
8/10
Appetite is under the articles. Even grief has to wait its turn.
Truth
8/10
Friendship between captain and doctor includes the right to argue.
Stewardship
9/10
The point of the voyage is that the crew comes home, and the sea is respected.

Live historicallyTake on one hard task with a partner who is allowed to tell you that you are wrong.