‘The Long Walk Home’ (PG)

Viewed as a made-for-TV movie, "The Long Walk Home" is a respectably stirring film about the rupturing birth of civil rights in the South. It shows -- with disarming simplicity -- the effect of the famous 1950s Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott on a black housekeeper (Whoopi Goldberg) and the white family that employs her.

The social message in "Walk Home" is unmistakable. The villains (racist cops, bigoted relatives) may huff and puff for most of the movie, but the victims (Goldberg, her family and the black movement) will not be blown over. Their glowing moral triumph by movie's end is a bankable certainty.

But if the fare is familiar, Goldberg's restrained, stoic performance as the maid who must serve her employers and the boycott raises the experience several pegs. Sissy Spacek, as Goldberg's employer, a white housewife who becomes increasingly aware of the social inequities in her own kitchen, also contributes an involving human presence.

Goldberg, who lives on the far side of town with husband Ving Rhames and their children, must take a long bus ride to get to the white neighborhood where she works. Conscientious in her job, she is also deeply committed to political emancipation. So, when blacks refuse to ride the buses rather than endure the indignities of sitting in the back, it means a twice-daily, bruising walk in uncomfortable shoes.

Spacek, who obviously needs her maid but also comes to appreciate the larger issue, gives her a ride twice a week. But she must hide this politically compromising activity from husband Dwight Schultz (and certainly his more bigoted brother, Dylan Baker). When Schultz stays home sick on the day Spacek usually gives Goldberg a ride, however, battle lines are drawn.

Although most of "Walk Home" heads down this ready-for-prime-time moral path, director Richard Pearce and screenwriter John Cork uncover some interesting dramatic grays along the way. When a white cop unceremoniously kicks out Goldberg and Spacek's white children from an exclusive park, Spacek exacts an apology from the police -- but for the humiliation of her children, not Goldberg. Later, she'll be more enlightened. On another occasion, Goldberg's adolescent daughter (Erika Anderson) breaks the boycott in favor of a far-more pressing issue -- to see a boyfriend.

Cinematographer Roger Deakins creates a pleasing, high-contrast look to the film. But director Pearce (a former documentary cameraman who worked on "Woodstock" and produced "Hearts & Minds," the classic Vietnam documentary) ignores most visual possibilities for a more TV-like drama, high on character conflict. There is a superfluous voice-over narration (done by Mary Steenburgen), supposedly the voice of Spacek's young daughter. The story tells itself without her help, and her character isn't even privy to the majority of the film's events (particularly Goldberg's home scenes).

The movie has, however, a feel for the period, including a memorable excerpt from a Martin Luther King Jr. speech. "If we are wrong," he intones off screen, "then the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, then God Almighty is wrong."

Some visual moments do stand out. When Spacek offers a ride to a stranded domestic, the black woman reaches for the front-door handle with a telling hesitancy. At the beginning of the movie, blacks step up to the white bus driver, plop in their coins, step back off the bus onto the sidewalk, then enter through the rear door to take their seats. It's done with an utterly business-as-usual air. This wordless scene manages to do what the entire movie attempts: It says it all.