
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, March 23, 1991                   TAG: 9103230313
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: E2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: CHRIS GLADDEN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

2 WOMEN WALK THROUGH TROUBLED ERA

"The Long Walk Home" is a sturdy, commendable look at the personal side of the civil rights movement that took fire in the 1950s. It may not be the brilliant dramatization that this epochal passage in American social history cries out for.

But it's a straightforward, sometimes stirring, story about the paths that carry two very different women to the same precipitous destination.

The time is 1955 and the place Montgomery, Ala.

Sissy Spacek plays Miriam Thompson, homemaker, bridge player and Junior Leaguer. Miriam lives in a Southern-fried version of post-World War II prosperity. She is insulated to all but her social life, her husband and her children.

Whoopi Goldberg plays Odessa Cotter, her black maid. Odessa has been with the Thompson family for nine years, arriving punctually each day by bus. When the courageous Rosa Parks refuses to sit on the back of the bus - where black citizens are exiled - and is arrested, the Montgomery bus boycott begins. It unsettles both the lives of Odessa and Miriam.

Odessa refuses to ride the bus to work and Miriam begins to drive her there a couple of days a week out of convenience, not conscience. On the other days, Odessa walks the nine miles, arriving tired and footsore.

Meanwhile, Miriam's husband (Dwight Schultz) is becoming more and more an active opponent of the boycott, joining his despicable brother and other bigoted business men in increasingly sinister efforts to end it.

Director Richard Pearce and his art department achieve a precise 1950s look. Writer John Cork's efforts are less even, tending toward emotion-rousing signals on the one hand and realistic and involving family conversations on the other. This is meant to be a fierce editorial of a movie and it doesn't allow much room for complexity. Unfortunately, history has taught us that the ugly, bigoted stereotypes that are presented were all too real - there is sad truth in cliche here.

The movie's major strengths lie in the performances of Goldberg and Spacek. Odessa is a woman of quiet determination and courage. Spacek, playing against type, portrays Miriam as a self-absorbed Dixie socialite, an oblivious thread in the pampered fabric of Montgomery society. It is a moment of startling revelation when it finally dawns on her that Odessa is a person with a life to lead outside of the orbit of the Thompson household.

`The Long Walk Home' *** A Miramax release playing at Tanglewood Mall Cinema (989-6165). Rated PG for violence; 100 minutes.

by CNB