THE LONG WALK HOME
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1991 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: A strong and emotional view of the 1955
Montgomery bus boycott does not always play fairly with the
facts but manages eventually to have some anger and
excitement. Rating: +2 (-4 to +4).
THE LONG WALK HOME is a powerful and moving film telling the story of simultaneous victories over racism and sexism during the 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. Sissy Spacek plays Miriam Thompson, who slowly comes to realize her own importance and her power to affect events when she is torn between loyalty to her family on one hand and her social conscience on the other.
Miriam, the wife of an influential real estate developer, is shocked when the police harass her maid Odessa Cotter (played by Whoopi Goldberg) for accompanying Miriam's children to a whites-only park. Using her position, she coerces the policeman into apologizing. When Rosa Parks is arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus, the blacks boycott the buses and Odessa begins the wearing routine of walking to and from the Thompson house. Initially more out of the need to have Odessa cleaning the house on time than out of any conviction, Miriam saves Odessa the long walk two mornings a week by picking her up on the way back from a convenient grocery. She hides this from her husband and his red-neck younger brother. Eventually her husband will find out and she will have to choose between her husband's insistence that no white woman can drive a black one and her own sense that the bus boycott is right and should be supported.
The film is a powerful statement, but it is doubtful that after 36 years any of the audience will have any sympathies against the boycott. Given that is the case, one might expect that director Richard Pearce and screenwriter John Cork could afford to be a little magnanimous to the losing side. This most certainly is not the case. With the exception of Miriam and her children, whites are uniformly portrayed as being racist, telling racist jokes, and being hypocritical. Blacks are all honest church-going people, wonderful to each other in closely-knit families. While these stereotypes may be substantially correct, the portrayal makes it a little overly obvious where the audience's sympathies should lie. The film also tampers a bit with historical fact. The CURRENT BIOGRAPHY article on Rosa Parks says that it had previously been the practice to force blacks to enter the bus at the front, pay the driver, exit the bus, and re-enter at the rear door so as not to walk past whites already on the bus. However, this practice had already been abandoned at the time of Parks's arrest. The film depicts this practice as if it were still going on at the time of the arrest. Certainly the truth is damning enough without distorting it to make an even stronger case. While it would be difficult to exaggerate the degree of polarization of whites against blacks at the time, this film manages. While it was a small percentage of Southern whites who supported the black cause, this film implies there were no more than a half dozen or so adult whites supporting the blacks, which does something of a disservice to those whites who were courageous to stand up for their conscience. It is the opposite problem to the one of MISSISSIPPI BURNING, which went to the other extreme, having it be mostly whites in the form of the FBI coming in and fighting for black freedom. My suspicion is that THE LONG WALK HOME is the closer to being accurate, but the truth lies somewhere in the range between the points-of-view of the two films.
Pacing is also a minor problem. It takes Miriam a long time to decide she will make a stand, then when the story gets going, it is over, with the remaining history told in screen titles. Still, THE LONG WALK HOME is good filmmaking. It makes the viewer angry about injustice rather than just depressed about it, the way GUILTY BY SUSPICION does. On that basis it deserves a +2 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
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