The Long Walk Home

Montgomery, Alabama, 1955. Odessa Cotter cleans and looks after the children in a white family's house. In December, black residents begin to boycott the buses. Odessa stops riding too; she walks to work every morning and walks home at night. The way is long. Miriam Thompson, the woman of the house, first treats it as an inconvenience, then begins driving her. She does not tell her husband. The boycott goes on, the tension in the city grows, and Miriam has to stand on one side. Richard Pearce directs. Whoopi Goldberg plays Odessa and Sissy Spacek plays Miriam. The event underlying the narrative is real: the Montgomery bus boycott lasted more than a year and put the bus company under economic strain. What the film puts at the centre is not great speeches but transport; the carpool arrangement built to keep the boycott alive is the axis of the narrative. The narrative does not make the white character a hero; Miriam is afraid, decides late, and cannot fully measure the cost of what she decides. Odessa's family carries on its own argument in the film, and her daughter's bearing is harder than her mother's. The strongest scene is the one in the car park; the crowd, the threat and the silent standing are all in the same place. Who it is for: viewers who like drama from the history of American civil rights. Who it is not for: the telling is classical, the narration heavy, and the film softens the conflict.