The Long Walk Home Review

The wave of Civil Rights-themed dramas made after Mississippi Burning didn’t get very far, and after drawing scarcely a look-in in the US, this nice women’s picture teaming two Oscar-winning actresses in 1990 was left on the shelf, finally emerging on video only. This is not altogether surprising despite some gripping moments. Taking for its background the historic black bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955-56, the story is something like a cross between Driving Miss Daisy and A World Apart.

Sissy Spacek is Miriam Thompson, well-heeled Southern belle who spends her days at luncheons and women’s club meetings. Whoopi Goldberg is Odessa Cotter, one of her maids, who is close to Miriam’s little daughter. Everyone knows her place in the scheme of segregated things until one day late in 1955 a weary working woman named Rosa Parks declines to give up her seat on the bus to a white man. Mrs Parks went to jail, and in an act of solidarity that proved the first stop on a long hard road, the black community said “Enough”, refusing to ride the segregated buses.

Odessa becomes one of the 50,000 who walks to work, an exhausting business that provokes the inconvenienced Miriam into grudgingly driving to pick her up. Miriam’s bossy husband freaks out, and life will never be the same again for any of them. As emphasised by the narration of the grown daughter looking back (voiced by a third Oscar alumna, Mary Steenburgen), it is Miriam’s need to be herself rather than her husband’s handmaiden that makes her gradually relate to Odessa as another kind of oppressed woman.

But her transformation into right-on Queen of the Black Car Pools is not entirely successful, and as in Driving Miss Daisy the “friendship” between the two principals is fundementally little more than the relationship of well-meaning employer to loyal domestic. What’s far more interesting is the picture of Odessa’s family and the black community, inspired by impassioned ministers at electrifying church assemblies with the kind of faith and strength demonstrated in the moving climax. Thus while Spacek’s playing is attractive, her problems and personal awakening take the back seat with the restrained, excellent Whoopi definitely in the driver’s seat.