Rebels Without a Clue

Running on Empty

Written by Naomi Foner

Directed by Sidney Lumet

At the USA Harvard Square

RUNNING on Empty puports to be about politics. In fact, the movie treats its political issues in only the most cursory and simplistic way. In reality the movie is about family, about love and about a son's coming of age. Politics is a pretext for these other issues, and unfortunately, in the hands of director Sidney Lumet, they are made tired and trite.

The film is loosely based on the true story of a couple who were involved in the bombing of a napalm factory in which someone was killed. In Running, the events are changed, and we are told the victim is only wounded, presumably to avoid alienating viewers from the fictitious couple, Annie (Christine Lahti) and Arthur Pope (Judd Hirsch) and their two sons Danny (River Phoenix) and Harry (Jonas Abry).

The film chronicles the family's constant flight from the FBI. They move from city to city, changing their names and their identities each time. The central conflict occurs when Danny at the age of 17 Simultaneously falls in love and decides he wants to go to Juilliard. In what is obviously meant to be the film's Big Irony, Danny's parents are forced to choose whether to break up their family in the same way they did when they broke the law.

The plot is explained in what has to be the clumsiest exposition ever. After escaping from one town and holing up in a motel, Harry reads the newspaper article about the Popes' disappearance to Danny, as if the two of them had forgotten their own lives. Running on Empty is that kind of movie. People turn on the TV or the radio just in time to catch exactly that news report which pertains to them.

This silly, TV-movie treatment extends to just about everything in the movie. The movie never deals intelligently with the guilt and political doubts of the Popes. Lumet trots out a bad guy revolutionary from their past to show that the Popes are nice guys, but aside from that brief scene, it doesn't really matter why they are underground except that it provides the movie with its premise.

Occasionally the movie is so inconsistent that it's hard to believe Lumet watched his own film. Arthur spends the entire film castigating his whole family about the need for secrecy, yet in one scene he gets drunk, comes home, and shrieks out a confession to the neighborhood at the top of his lungs. It is one of the first moments where the movie goes definitively from implausible to just plain stupid.

The movie exploits the issue of family separation relentlessly. At heart, Running on Empty is a tearjerker. A particular heart-wrencher is the scene where Annie confronts her father after years of separation. Lahti, who is invariably better than the movies she is in, turns in a solid, believable performance. But the scene is disturbing, not only because it is emotionally manipulative, but also because it suggests that the Popes have forgotten that their sacrifice was a protest against bourgeois ideals. Annie goes back to her father, whom she once described as an "imperialist pig" for help in sending her son to Juilliard, which is a kind of bourgeois shrine. The scene could have been plausible if we had seen Annie struggle with these inconsistencies. Instead, her actions prove that the Popes are in no way different from any other middle-class family except that they occasionally make "socially aware" comments and are not uptight about sex.

AND finally, besides being a tearjerker, Running on Empty is a teen romance film, centering on Danny's falling in love with a high school classmate, Lorna (Martha Plimpton). Plimpton is down to earth and sarcastic in her supporting role. She gets some of the movie's best lines and plays them with a kind of sassy offhandedness. She's great fun to watch, but she's out of sync with the hyper-earnestness of everyone around her, especially Phoenix.

Phoenix is intense; he never smiles. He's uncompromisingly, darkly sincere. In fact, everyone in the movie looks just a little depressed, as if someone had told them that it is improper to smile a lot in a movie that treats Serious Subjects. The movie's best scene takes place when it loosens up during a birthday party for Annie. The family and Lorna start singing James Taylor's "Fire and Rain."

As they dance to the music, we see that they are truly stirred by the 60's anthem. It's one of the few moments when it seems there was something these people really believed in, something they fought for. We also see that their dream had as much to do with a utopian (what we now tend to disparage as "touchyfeely") vision of how people would treat each other as it did with social change. We understand then that the '60s promised to a generation that youth and idealism could really make a difference.

And that scene makes the rest of the movie seem even more duplicitous and phony. The convinctions which led the Popes to their unorthodox lives were infinitely more complex than Lumet would have us believe. But these issues are sidestepped to turn their story into a melodrama. Running on Empty relies on platitudes about both people and politics and ultimately runs out of gas.