teenage boy in jeans and a baggy gray T-shirt is biking home from baseball practice one bright afternoon when a fleet of black cars carrying mysterious government types starts to prowl around him, their sunglasses barely concealing the intensity of their collective gaze. It’s an odd sight. For Danny Pope (River Phoenix), it’s nothing out of the ordinary.
Danny, the young protagonist of Sidney Lumet’s empathetic, achey family drama Running on Empty (1988), has been on the run since he was 2. His parents, Annie and Arthur (Christine Lahti and Judd Hirsch), bombed a napalm lab in 1971 to protest the Vietnam War, a fact the movie offers with a snatch of clunky exposition coming courtesy of a front-page newspaper story. The act of protest by the pair, in college at the time, was meant to be purely symbolic. But it turned into something more consequential when a custodian they were certain would not be in the building was paralyzed and blinded when they detonated their device.
Rather than face the consequences, the two have opted to live as fugitives. They’re adept at finding a new place to squat at the drop of a hat and taking care of other practical matters, from passport updates to license-plate switches, like they were as mundane as Sunday-afternoon trips to the grocery store. The first time we see the Popes move, they even detachedly abandon the lost dog they took in on the side of the road without much hesitation, a furry friend ostensibly too big a liability when relocating from here to there. We are disappointingly never really made overtly privy to the Pope family’s current political ideologies, and how much the 1971 incident has quelled their conviction in their cause; the movie largely avoids engaging with leftist politics beyond them being, to my eye, something to outgrow, preferring to reach across political aisles and focus more of its attention on the often powerfully emotional terrain the film’s story — a buffet of family dysfunction, among other things — covers.
River Phoenix and Martha Plimpton in Running on Empty.
Annie and Arthur’s sons, Danny and the much younger Harry (Jonas Abry), have been made into accomplices. They’re forced to dye their hair in the sink at the latest checkpoint; they register at new schools under new names they’ve practiced responding to without missing a beat at home. Running on Empty, written by Naomi Foner, begins just before the Popes’ precarious way of life is confronted with what might be its biggest existential threat yet. The family has been so caught up in its day-to-day survival that no one has thought much about how Danny, in the early days of his senior year when the film starts, might have some interest in a life outside the one he’s been forced into. Danny himself hasn’t thought much about his future, but at his new school, his band teacher, Mr. Phillips (Ed Crowley), can envision one.
In all his spare time as a forced loner, Danny, who has long tinkered with his mother’s old keyboard usually with the sound off, has become something of a piano prodigy. He’s able to tell from just the few notes who the composer is when Mr. Phillips plays an excerpt of a song for a class; he can perfectly perform something complicated and classical on the spot. Danny is good enough to potentially get a full-ride scholarship to somewhere prestigious, like Juilliard — a thing it would be nicer for the Popes to hear if it didn’t also mean not ever being able to see Danny again in any meaningful sense.
Lumet directs scenes quietly, their dramatic gravity heavy in the air, as its characters emotionally venture into places they’ve learned to avoid. Danny gets his first girlfriend, Lorna (Martha Plimpton), with whom he often goes on long walks where he has to be choosy about what he will and won’t reveal. Annie is visited by a former paramour (L.M. Kit Carson) who’s notionally stayed put in radical-left activist mode; she’s made to really ponder what it might be like to escape the nightmare inside which she and her family have been trapped for nearly 20 years. Foner’s screenplay, sensitive and humane though not invulnerable to the maudlin, convincingly portrays a profoundly unhealthy (but unquestionably loving) family dynamic where almost everyone seems to be overperforming their happiness in place of truly meaning it, as if they were aware too much explicitness about their miseries could bring the house of cards down.
Phoenix’s performance evocatively channels that heaviness. His Danny is at a crossroads, his love for his family great but a mounting yearning for something more — abetted by the adamantly encouraging Lorna — becoming greater. He’s never gotten to enjoy the carefreeness about which many kids his age don’t think twice; it’s in the movie’s moving scenes where Phoenix is playing against Plimpton (whom he was dating in real life at the time) where we feel like we’re seeing someone be their true self for the first time, a goofy sense of humor and a freedom to speak candidly tapped into after years of suppression for the sake of a family unit that’s always taken precedence.
Martha Plimpton, River Phoenix, Judd Hirsch, and Christine Lahti in promotional photo for Running on Empty.
Some of that impression comes from the perceptiveness of Foner’s writing. But it’s probably more so a corollary of Phoenix’s preternatural emotional intelligence as a performer. (Much of the power of his work is reaped from what you can feel Danny is keeping clamped, transient flickers of the eyes and quivers of the lips among the tells of his pent-in sadness.) You’d probably feel like you were watching a dynamic early performance from one of our great actors were Phoenix not dead in a little more than five years of an accidental drug overdose. The knowledge of Phoenix’s fate, juxtaposed with the sense of hope and possibility undergirding Danny’s journey toward autonomy, gives Running on Empty an additional layer of poignance. Whenever I watch the movie, I wonder what it must have been like seeing it in 1988, when Danny and Phoenix’s huge, exciting potential felt of a piece and that was all there was to it.
Running on Empty still feels like a showcase for a sure-to-be-career-catapulting performance from a young actor. But it’s as much, I think, Lahti’s movie. The film’s first section is mostly devoted to Danny realizing he deserves something more. Its second primarily sees Annie recognizing what Arthur, so self-preservationally stuck in the way things are, doesn’t want to: that they’re en route to ruining their eldest son’s life if they don’t do what they can to support the future they’ve always tried not to think about, even if that means one day turning themselves in. (If they’re going to do that, they think it best to wait until Harry — so much an afterthought in the movie, outside of some comic relief, that its promotional posters generally didn’t include him — is 18 and no longer dependent on them.)
Running on Empty’s centerpiece scene arrives late in the movie, when Annie reluctantly meets her estranged father and has to, as quickly as she can, ask him a life-altering favor while only being able to cursorily acknowledge how much pain she’s caused. It’s the scene where everything that makes the movie so sore to the touch — the way one action can ruin a life, and the emotional devastations it can leave even on those in the periphery — feels rawest. Astounding in the movie, Lahti fights to keep internal the outward signs of her character’s bottomless regret in a busy restaurant. (Like the critic Sheila O’Malley said a few years ago, it feels hard to breathe throughout the scene.) Running on Empty sees what happens when a center can no longer hold, when the illusion fades.
Peterson Reviews 