Successful movies usually position the audience into the main character’s’ perspective and made the audience feel the emotions that the characters are having. In the movie “A Time to Kill,” the director Joel Schumacher used different techniques to evoke viewers’ empathy which leads them to believe that the main character Carl Lee is not guilty. Throughout the movie, the director has conveyed this idea by showing us the suffering that the characters went through. Especially at the beginning of the movie, the rape scene had let the audience felt empathy for the little girl. The movie started off with the two drunken white men humiliated the black people in the town. When they saw Carl Lee’s daughter little Tonya carrying her groceries on the road, they abducted her to the forest and then brutally tortured, beat and raped her. Although the director didn’t directly show the audience the violent raping scene, it still gives us enough pictures like blood, bruise, and rope to let people imagine what happened. The two minutes scene had shown the viewers how despairing and scared the little girl was which evoke our feeling of empathy. This scene had created that the two men were deserved to die and we understand why Carl Lee would kill the two men.
I think the empathy that this scene evoke is real because the director used first person point of view to let the audience understand what a ten-year-old girl had experienced. In this way, the audience would actually place them into the situation and felt empathy for the little girl. During the movie, I had to pause the movie several times because I couldn’t even imagine how painful she was.What influenced me the most in this scene is when little tonya kept shouting: “Daddy, daddy”(ATTK 04:52-05:10), but no one was there to help her. The contrast between the brutality of the two men and the weak girl has appealed to me how vulnerable that little Tonya was. When facing such an instance, all she can do is to scream and cry for her dad desperately and waited for all of these to be over. The director used this scene at the beginning to influence people to believe it’s rightful for Carl Lee to kill the two men. Without this scene, people wouldn’t understand Carl Lee’s motivation for the shooting. The empathy that this scene brought is also the reason why Carl Lee was verdict to be innocent. It led the jurors to despite the races and realize the fact that this kind of horrible things can happen to anyone including themselves and their family. I think the movie has successfully made me felt what little Tonya felt. For me, the empathy for her didn’t go away when the movie was over, I still felt sorry for what she had experienced.
Work Cited
A Time to Kill. Dir. Joel Schumacher. Regency Enterprises, Warner Bros, 1996. digital campus. Web. 20 September 2017