upstill@pixar.com (04/23/91)
THE LONG WALK HOME
A film review by Steve Upstill
Copyright 1991 Steve Upstill
Directed by Richard Pearce
Starring Whoopi Goldberg and Sissy Spacek
Summary: Socially correct historical drama scores in a big way
by foregoing melodramatics, histrionics and contrivance in favor
of simple human observation and dead-on accurate sense of place
and time.
You know the type: the well-meaning, socially redeeming, liberally
uplifting Hollywood movie. GANDHI. MISSISSIPPI BURNING. LILIES OF THE
FIELD. CRY FREEDOM. NORMA RAE. Etc., etc. You know the characters:
the saintly hero(es) doing the right thing at deadly threat to life and
limb; the horrific villains eager to maim to maintain the status quo.
You know the scenes: heroes confront injustice and muster their inner
resources for the battle; dramatic scenes of human transcendence as
heroes reach out and touch one another in ways they never expected;
villains beat up on heroes who in spite of their fear and ambivalence
stick to their path; ultimate triumph in the end as heroes are
vindicated and villains vanquished. You know the sell: see this movie,
it's Good For You.
I know the type too, which is why THE LONG WALK HOME was on my B
list of movies until last night, when the starting time happened to be
right. It may just be my background in the South, but there were
several times that I wondered if I was going to be able to take the
whole thing, and that was just in the first half.
It's about the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott of 1955-56, one of
the first incidents in recorded history where blacks stood up for
themselves against their surrounding society. Whoopi Goldberg is maid
to Sissy Spacek, middle-class housewife and pillar of her community.
The details are astonishingly right, from the accents to the way
people look to the horrible 1950s interior decoration. Most Hollywood
movies set in the South don't have a clue, treating the locale and its
occupants like exotic, threatening specimens from some far-off planet,
who wind up unrecognizable to anybody who's actually *from* there.
Believe me, this movie gets it right. I can still remember my mother's
bridge party cackling at the news of Martin Luther King's death, and I
believe I recognized one or two of them in the bridge party here.
Of course the credits are first-rate. Whoopi Goldberg has to
convey quiet strength without becoming saintly, and she does. Sissy
Spacek's housewife has to give up her whole life without a word to
anyone, and she does. These two roles are ripe for an orgy of Acting,
but these two actors gave up their shot at an Oscar for the sake of
their characters.
But what impressed me most was what's missing. The villains are
hissable, but you recognize them as regrettable, but real, human beings
with understandable, though not admirable, motives. There isn't a
whisper of insufferability in any of the heroes. And it doesn't focus
on the white middle-class housewife and the way her life is touched and
transformed by these Struggling Negroes. It's about the most unheroic
heroes you ever saw.
The biggest surprise omission is the lack of Big Scenes. The
boycott starts about two minutes into the picture, and it's not even
over before the end: no victory rally, no heroic vindication. In fact,
you can probably spot half a dozen opportunities for the big scene, each
one of them resolutely passed over in favor of, I think, bigger stakes.
For example, there's a scene just after a black minister's house is
bombed. The maids are in the kitchen, doing their usual work, and the
housewife is just standing in the living room, looking at them. Not a
word is said, not a movement is made. This film is secure enough to
let you feel the gulf between those two rooms all by yourself, and sure
enough, you do. What a compliment to the audience.
By maintaining a human level of interaction, THE LONG WALK HOME
is out to touch you deeply rather than hitting you over the head with
the kind of drama that these pictures specialize in. And for me it
succeeded magnificently. Maybe it's just me, maybe I was just in the
mood, but I haven't seen a movie in a long time that had me so close to
tears so often, with such understated dynamics.
I'll tell you, it's really something different to be so moved by a
movie that doesn't need histrionics or contrived heroics to do it. Did
I mention that I think you might like to check this movie out for
yourself?
Steve Upstillleeper@mtgzy.att.com (Mark R. Leeper) (04/23/91)
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
att!mtgzy!leeper
leeper@mtgzy.att.com