Running on Empty (Sidney Lumet, 1988)
There are two throw away lines of dialogue spoken by River Phoenix. Each line is spoken under separate assumed identities. The first: Baseball is my life. The second: Guitar is my life. And neither of these is true in the case of Danny (his real identity), or perhaps they both are. River Phoenix plays a typical teenager searching for himself, except, like most teenagers, he is living a life that is not of his choice or his making even if he knows that in theory it is a moral and righteous one.
Halfway through the movie he admits that ‘He is a liar’. He might be referring to the life under disguise, but also he is speaking about himself, of his inability to forge one of his own. It’s a performance that feels so schizophrenic, authentic to all teenagers who could not possibly know what they want, but they desire that certainty. Martha Plimpton, on the other hand, plays someone who knows what she doesn’t want: She doesn’t want her class picture clicked with students she considers subhuman, she dislikes the way her parents treat their help nor does she care much for their opinion about her life.
They’re both surrounded by adults who seem sure of what they want and what the kids should want. He is conformist in a family of rebels and she is rebel in a little Norman Rockwell family. Theirs is a meandering sweet romance. If that were all, still this would be a winsome script. But Naomi Foner’s screenplay is elevated by dialogue that is evidently writerly in its symmetry but, importantly, not didactic.
A movie that follows a family of activists/revolutionaries on the run sure does sound like a taut thriller, but Lumet is more interested in examining these apparently ethical choices in a post war neoliberal state. And instead of treating this as an intellectual exercise Lumet delves into the personal: he lets his characters move and breathe and work it out amongst themselves. In doing so he makes room for the little joys even if they are laced with palpable sense of impermanence. And he plays out each scene long enough till it sours, till each character breaks as they are forced to consider if not suffer the cost of their choices
Lastly, this is a movie about being a parent, a topic about which I know very little. But as an single child I can imagine what it must feel like for my mum and dad, who did everything they thought was right only to realise that the sum of their choices resulted in letting me fly away on my own.