Movie of the Week: RUNNING ON EMPTY (Sidney Lumet, 1988)

River Phoenix, man

With One Battle After Another sweeping the nation, I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to look at a movie that Paul Thomas Anderson has cited as a major influence on his new creation. I’ll also admit that I was drawn to the prospect of reappraising Sidney Lumet; for whatever reason — Dog Day Afternoon (1975) aside — I’ve never been particularly taken with the director’s work, as much as I respect it. Maybe it’s because I’ve found that his background in television often lends his movies a visual staidness that I wish he’d broken free of the way, say, Robert Altman did. Whatever reservations I had, however, went out the window about twenty minutes into Running on Empty, such was I swept into its agonizingly tender vision of a family on the run from the past. Arthur (Judd Hirsch) and Annie Pope (Christine Lahti) are two former ’60s radicals who, two decades before the events of the film, blew up a lab that was manufacturing napalm for American use in Vietnam. They’ve been eluding the FBI ever since, forging new identities every few months while somehow raising two boys: seventeen-year-old Danny (River Phoenix) and ten-year-old Harry (Jonas Abry). If that situation looks nigh impossible on paper, Lumet and his actors’ portrayal of this harried yet meticulous existence renders it utterly convincing. It’s likely down to the palpable love you can feel flowing between the members of the Pope family, and the sense that these tragic parental figures have instilled in their children a rare intelligence. But it’s also love that undoes everything. For the piano-prodigy Danny (now “Michael”) loves music, and grows to love Lorna (Martha Plimpton), the daughter of the music teacher at his new school in Jersey. Thus Running on Empty is a great film about love coming into conflict with itself, anchored by (not exaggerating here) one of the best performances I’ve ever seen. As Danny, the late Phoenix speaks constant lies with his mouth yet can’t help telling the truth with his eyes, face, and body; he suggests a young man who knows he’s wiser than most of the adults around him, and never once stoops to hold it against them. That’s not to say the other performances are anything to sniff at. Hirsch, Lahti, and Plimpton all do heartbreaking work, while Steven Hill nearly steals the show in a single scene as Annie’s estranged father. So yes, I’ll concede that Lumet’s stay-out-of-the-way approach works wonders here, though much credit should also go to the note-perfect screenplay by Naomi Foner (who is, fun fact, the mother of Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal). Discovery of the year for me!

Streaming on Kanopy; available for rent on Apple TV, Amazon Prime, and other major platforms.