Running on Empty

RUNNING ON EMPTY   **1/2

Sidney Lumet

1988

IDEA:  On the lam for a near-deadly act of anti-war activism they committed over a decade earlier, two parents raise their children as fugitives and grapple with their eldest son's growing independence.

BLURB:  Running on Empty is a political film that tries not to be political, and in the process, becomes more political than it ever needed to be. There are certainly a myriad of intriguing possibilities inherent in the premise of two former hippie activists who now find themselves leading a nuclear family while on the run from the law. But Naomi Foner is not interested in most of them. Instead, she uses the incident that turned them into fugitives - the protest bombing of a military facility during the Vietnam War - as merely a catalyst for a pretty typical family melodrama. Running on Empty works quite well as a family melodrama, its uniformly strong performances and frequently sharp writing deftly navigating the sorrows and ambivalences created by a child’s burgeoning independence from their parents. The sense of cyclical and universal intergenerational tension is brought powerfully home in the late scene between Annie and her estranged father, which highlights how so much of what a parent goes through with their children has been experienced in some variation by their elders, with them. Yet it’s also this scene that reinforces the film’s troubling subtext, positing liberalism as a threat to family unity. How much more interesting and productively complicated would Running on Empty be if Danny’s growth hinged on the development of political consciousness, of any ideological leaning, rather than puppy love and the bourgeois pursuit (inherited from his mother and grandmother, of course) of being a pianist at Juilliard? It would be much more interesting, and challenging. As is, Running on Empty is very much a product of Reagan-era Hollywood, slickly affecting and reactionary at heart.