Dole List

By RICHARD CORLISS

THE LONG WALK HOME

Directed by Richard Pearce

Screenplay by John Cork

Deck the Christmas movie column, / Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la!/ 'Tis the season to be solemn,/ Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la!

For most of the year, the movie industry keeps its social conscience under wraps. Then December rolls around, and like a Park Avenue pasha handing Christmas envelopes to the servants, Hollywood remembers the less fortunate. On this year's dole list are the American Indian (Dances with Wolves), the mentally bereft (Awakenings), the Nisei interned during World War II (Come See the Paradise) -- noble victims all, and all seen through the dewy eyes of a white male star (Kevin Costner or Robin Williams or Dennis Quaid) who elevates their plight by suffering along with them.

The Long Walk Home, at least, gets points for making the audience's white surrogate a woman and for giving equal emotional weight to the black woman who spurs her toward responsible action. In Montgomery in 1955, blacks are boycotting city buses until they are allowed to sit wherever they please. ! Odessa Cotter (Whoopi Goldberg) must walk nine miles to her job as maid for the Thompson family. And Miriam Thompson (Sissy Spacek) must take a painful journey too, from the blinkered bourgeoisie to courageous solidarity with her sisters under the skin.

Goldberg and Spacek perform their good deeds without undue condescension, and Dwight Schultz is really fine as Spacek's husband, teetering between propriety and principle. But no actor's art can disguise the simplemindedness of this tract or the stodginess with which it is dramatized. What are audiences to learn about today's racial antagonisms from a long-ago tug of war between saints (the black underclass) and demons (the Alabama plutocracy)? The movie plays like a Christmas card whose sentiment is noble but whose poetry is doggerel.