RUNNING ON EMPTY (1988) *** Christine Lahti and Judd Hirsch are a couple of Vietnam-era radicals on the run, trying to raise a family and contribute to the social good wherever they go. Like Kathleen Soliah and James Kilgore, except together with children. The obvious political ruminations are ignored: why, for example, when Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger engineered a successful plan to exterminate 3 million people in Vietnam, for reasons that effectively everyone now agrees were wrong and even illegal, did they get astronomical pensions (at taxpayer expense) and more fringe benefits than most of us can imagine... while on the po' part of town, people like Soliah and Kilgore get what are essentially life prison sentences (also at taxpayer expense) for actions with very vew casualities, that everyone now concede were also illegal and wrong, but taken in desperate opposition to the Nixon/Kissinger plan? Anyway, that kind of stuff is ignored, instead Sidney Lumet focuses on the relationships between humans (similar to his work in Daniel, but without the consistency or Doctorow's blueprint). With entirely mixed success-some scenes are very powerful but there are a few clunkers. Lahti 's scene with her father (Steven Hill) is exceptional, cinema of an incredibly high order, as is the closing scene. River Phoenix mirrors his surroundings; perfectly expressing the ambivalence of a well-raised teenager who has spent his life hiding who he is, not as the result of his own actions but because of those of his parents ("The sins of the fathers..."), but not infallible to being tripped up (the actor, not the character). Judd Hirsch has a few moments of his own, but ultimately can't deliver on the potentiality of a historically intriguing character: the American-Jewish red diaper baby who never sold out-an incredible study of complexities (artistic, but anti-bourgeoisie art) and contradictions (revolutionary rigidity to overthrow lesser societal rigidity); a family man at his core who perhaps engaged in experimentations with extended family that didn't go well. When do you use James Taylor's "Fire and Rain" to jump-start a film about revolutionaries? The same time you make a film about them that doesn't engage obvious political questions. When you're translating the simplest bits for the crowd outside. Fortunately for the targets, and not coincidentally, there wasn't an advertising budget to speak of. The song, incidentally, works to incredible effect.
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