RUNNING ON EMPTY
With Christine Lahti, River Phoenix, Judd Hirsch, Martha Plimpton, Jonas Abry, Ed Crowley, and Steven Hill.
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The present of Sidney Lumet’s Running on Empty is, in effect, little more than the past of two 70s radicals combined with the future of one of their sons. The couple, Annie and Arthur Pope (Christine Lahti and Judd Hirsch), have been living “underground” for 15 years, ever since they helped to bomb a napalm laboratory, accidentally blinding a janitor. The older of their two sons, Danny (River Phoenix), now 17, has to “break ranks” with them and strike out on his own if he wants to realize his own potential (his love life and his gifts as a pianist). The conflict is expressed and eventually overcome exclusively in family terms, which is to say that from an 80s perspective, politics never come into it at all; yet from a 60s/70s perspective–the viewpoint of Arthur and Annie, who come from and still embody a time in which politics were a family matter, and family matters were above all political–politics are very much at the root of the issue.
How that audience is being served and honored, on the other hand, is principally with nostalgia, the curse and boon of the American left, the same commodity that gave Lumet’s previous liberal weepies their exchange value. It’s true, of course, that the movie’s central character is Danny, an 80s teenager, and not his parents. All of the movie’s most decorous framing, and the artiest lighting effects in Gerry Fisher’s handsome cinematography, are lavished on him. His features are lighted like those of Adonis as he lies in bed. His sensitivity–as he caresses the keys on his music teacher’s grand piano, for instance–is caught like a delicate caged bird. The camera’s hagiographical treatment of River Phoenix may get a little sticky in spots, but it’s one indication of his talent as an actor and Danny’s depth as a character that the movie usually get’s away with it. And part of the uninsistent beauty of Foner’s screenplay is that it doesn’t take the usual tack of treating separate generations as mutually exclusive entities. Danny’s character is less a refutation of his parents’ values than an embodiment of them; he might even be said to represent a second chance for them to prevail, in another period and context.
But Lumet can’t resist gilding this lily at the end of the film by pumping up an already strong and effective final scene with the same song, which appears on the sound track as if by celestial contrivance. To me this seems a bit like transcribing a graceful jazz solo in order to forge its notes into bronze. As far back as the 60s, around the time that Annie and Arthur Pope were meeting in college, Lumet was already committing similar errors in overdeliberation by cutting a jarring close-up of Katharine Hepburn into a beautifully modulated retreating camera movement during her final monologue in Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1962), and juicing up a script that was already melodramatically overwrought in The Pawnbroker (1965) with portentous mise en scene.
