Running on Empty. - movie reviews

National Review, Oct 28, 1988 by John Simon

IT IS ALMOST impossible to make a serious movie in Hollywood these days. (Actually, it wasn't much easier before.) If the idea is a potentially good one, such as that of Running on Empty, the following requirements are sure to reduce it to pap by the time it comes off the production line.

1. The picture must not offend anyone. The story of Arthur and Annie Pope, who bombed a governmentsponsored laboratory that made napalm for the Vietnam War, and who have been living on the run with their two sons, was triggered by the actual bombing of the mathematics building at the University of Wisconsin, where a graduate student, working late, was killed. In the movie, the victim was a janitor (less valuable than a grad student), and he was only blinded and crippled (no actual blood on the Popes' hands): the Popes need the blessing and forgiveness of the audience.

2. It must have something for everyone. Let's make Artie Jewish because so many radicals were, including, I dare say, the film's director (Sidney Lumet) and writer (Naomi Foner) and their families, as well as many moviegoers. Let's, however, be sure to make Annie not only Christian but also a runaway debutante-a WASP formerly in best standing-so we can make sure of the rest of the audience, especially those proper Republicans whose children rebel.

Weathermen and such, who went in for bombing and then went underground, were not burdened with offspring; but a whole family on the lam makes the movie a family picture, commercially very desirable. If the family survives by changing towns, names, low-paying jobs-well, that makes them appealing to the proletarians in the audience. If we see them moving from Florida to New Jersey, if a few scenes are shot in New York City streets, this makes the movie saleable abroad as a quasi-travelogue. But just how deadly dull those jobs-Annie's as a doctor's receptionist, Artie's as a short-order cook-are must not be gone into.

3. Some element in the film must make it attractive to youth, the biggest group of moviegoers. So it is 17-yearold Dan Pope who becomes the center of attention: he is a musical genius. With initial lessons ftom his mother and constant practice on a portable soundless keyboard, he can elicit from a briefly encountered Steinway the most gorgeous Beethoven or Chopin. So, at his latest school, Mr. Phillips, his music teacher, wants to recommend him for Juilliard, and the boy is itching to go. But he loves his boorish, unreconstructedly and infantilely radical father too much to leave him. What keeps volatile Artie going in his underground existence is a loving wife and boy (Harry, the younger, is only ten and not yet supportive).

But today's young, divided as they are, don't just want an obedient, respectful son; they also need a rebel. So the movie provides one from column B. Mr. Phillips's daughter, Lorna, who falls for Dan as he does for her, is a hellion who treats her doting, cowed father with exemplary disrespect. Let him so much as enter her room without knocking and he gets her lip, if not the back of her hand. This elicits Dan's admiration, even as the sticky cohesion of the Pope family stirs up Lorna's longings. The formulaic, manipulative script manages to have it both was.

4. Indeed, the film must have it both ways about everything. Though Dan is a studious, dedicated classical pianist, he is not some sort of acned, highbrow nerd, No, as played by handsome and virile River Phoenix, he plays baseball and knows pop music, too; he will even tap his foot when Mr. Phillips plays some of it in musicappreciation class. (If high-school classes are indeed as much fun as shown here, we are in serious trouble.)

Notice especially how "the Revolution" is treated in the movie. The laboratory bombing emerges as a onetime lark that accidentally went sour. Since then the three (later four) Popes have been living in close harmony, with only Arthur inveighing against capitalist evils such as the chambermusic concert he wants to keep Dan from attending. Warm remembrance of flings past surfaces when, at Annie's birthday party, the Popes and Lorna dance to James Taylor's "Fire and Rain" in the most down-home American way, complete with victrola, paper hats, candle blowing, and inexpensive presents as prescribed by Artie, either found (sea shells) or homemade (whales carved from bits of wood).

Dan, 17, and Harry, ten, driven from pillar to post in the family van, remain pure as the driven snow despite all that name-changing, hairdyeing, having to drop everything and run from the Feds. No school problems, drug problems, sibling rivalry. How they manage to get into new schools each time without records from the former ones (We lost our papers in a fire), how new passports and identities are acquired by their parents-not to mention how wages are paid in cash-is adumbrated but not made believable. The kids don't even know what their parents' crime was or who their grandparents are until they find out ftom a newspaper article; but none of this makes them neurotic or intractable.