This month, our Faith & Film night will take place on the third Friday (instead of the second) — and it’s coming up soon — Friday, April 21, 7:00-10:00 p.m.
We will watch the critically-acclaimed 1990 film, “The Long Walk Home” (PG). For more information, please see Mark Grimsley’s Northwind article below.
Popcorn and pop will be provided. If you would like to attend and are in need of transportation or child care, please contact Joanna Samuelson by Wednesday, 4/19.
Hope you can make it — invite a friend — all are welcome!
March Faith and Film Night featured Selma, the acclaimed 2014 film about the strategy and tactics of nonviolent resistance as they played out in the climactic confrontation between Civil Rights activists and the entrenched segregationist order in 1965 Alabama. The turnout for the film was larger than usual. The discussion afterward plainly indicated that those present had much more to say than time allowed.
April’s Faith and Film Night offering is the 1990 film The Long Walk Home, a choice intended to allow the conversation to continue (and whose 97-minute running time allows more scope for discussion afterward). The film takes place ten years before the events at Selma. It deals with the Montgomery Bus Boycott that launched the modern Civil Rights Movement. Selma viewed the Movement from the perspective of its top leadership, particularly Martin Luther King, Jr. The Long Walk Home examines how the nascent Movement affects two ordinary women: Miriam Thompson (Sissy Spacek), an affluent housewife who presides over pancakes and plans for the Junior League; and her maid, Odessa Cotter (Whoopi Goldberg).
Odessa is nearly invisible to Miriam, a background figure in Miriam’s comfortable life. She works hard, dresses neatly and never complains. She is inured to the tedium of the job and the little humiliations that go with it, particularly the daily nine-mile ride from her home to Miriam’s aboard a bus in which she is forced to sit in the back.
The boycott overthrows the two women’s unexamined acceptance of the lives they lead in a segregationist society. Odessa joins the boycott and begins to make the nine-mile commute on foot. She is not eager for her employer to discover she is honoring the boycott—she doesn’t want to risk losing her job—but one day Miriam finds out, and decides that she will give the maid a ride in her car a couple of days a week. She has no idea that this is a political act, but her embarrassed and angry husband (played by Dwight Schultz) does. She and her husband grow in different ways because of the boycott. Miriam is no activist, but can see as a wife and a mother what Odessa and the boycotting black women are going through, begins to sympathize with them, and develops an unexpected relationship with Odessa.
The Long Walk Home is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested). It includes racial epithets and other harsh language.