Running on Empty (1988)

(On Cable TV, December 2020) I didn’t expect to develop much sympathy for the adult protagonists of Running on Empty. As the film quickly sketches out, here are two ex-activists who ended up maiming a janitor in a laboratory bombing in the 1970s, then spending the 15 previous years on the run while raising two boys. Who can empathize with people like that? Fortunately, though, the emphasis of the film is on their elder son, a gifted pianist who is getting fed up with uprooting himself every few years, as his parents are terrified of being discovered by the authorities and keep a nomadic lifestyle. The script does a fine job of portraying the toll that regular uprooting can take, especially outside a controlled context providing support. The protagonist is played by River Phoenix, going a rather good job as the one most affected by the decisions of his parents. There’s a mixture of social drama and paranoid thriller going on here, especially when the runaways themselves keep suffering for not turning themselves in. From a narrative perspective, Running on Empty is messy: While it has a clear moral centre in the eldest son, it does spend some time on tangents related to other family members – it shouldn’t work, but somehow it coheres into a strong conclusion that is no less effective from being predictable long in advance. Director Sidney Lumet is at ease with a complex, politically aware script, and the cleanliness of his work does much to untangle a script filled with tangents.