Movie review: "The Long Walk Home" (1990)
Sissy Spacek, Whoopi Goldberg,
Dwight Schultz
Director: Richard Pearce
This is the kind of movie that
makes you want to cry—not because you watched the movie, but because what
you're watching really happened.
I didn't live in Montgomery,
Alabama, in 1955….didn't know about the bus boycott at the time. Shame on most
of the white folks who are accurately portrayed in "The Long Walk
Home," the racist citizens who complained at their dinner parties that
"the niggers don't want to work" while their black maids were serving
dinner. And much too tardy and much too inadequate praise for the other white folks who are
accurately portrayed, the ones who felt the injustice, a little bit or a lot,
that framed their everyday lives, living with their black neighbors in Montgomery.
This is a message movie, plain
and simple. Sissy and Whoopi are the messengers, plain and simple. They know
what they're doing and they send the message to the viewer, straight from the
shoulder, right between the eyes.
It all seems very calm, except for the one, not-too-violent
crowd violence scene at the carpool intersection—frankly, it's a bit awkwardly choreographed,
but the denouement is satisfying.
Sissy, rather incredibly, tells
her domineering, bigoted, abusive husband to stuff himself at the very end. Good
message, but not too realistic, I guess, from a white 1950s housewife in Montgomery, Alabama.
But Sissy is the other strong character—Sissy
is on the right side of the bus boycott, and she sticks her neck out a lot more
than Whoopi's maid character does.
There is dreadful truth, and heroism,
in "The Long Walk Home."
p.s. I talked with a trusted personal
advisor about this movie, and her comments moved me to add these thoughts:
I can read about the Egyptians
enslaving hundreds of thousands to build the pyramids and feel sympathetic, and
I can read about the Huns sacking Rome and killing tens of thousands and
feel rueful, and I can read about the
Inquisition and feel indignant, and I can read about the wholesale destruction of
the First Peoples of North America after the Europeans arrived….and you know,
on and on….and then I can look at the 1920s photos of the lynchings in the
South and feel desperately angry, and then I can watch “Long Walk Home” and
feel wretchedly helpless and realize
that lots of the white folks who lived in Montgomery in 1955 are still alive
and wonder if they’ve changed their outlook at all, and hope that their
children aren’t in schoolrooms teaching my grandchildren anytime soon…..
