secondtake Running on Empty First of all, what a great performance by River Phoenix. In fact, there are smart, convincing, warm performances by all the main cast. At first you might feel this is a movie about a couple on the lam for a long ago crime, and that they happened to have two kids. But really the opening of the movie, an inside view from Phoenix's character's situation, makes clear that he is the start, and the fulcrum around which the rest of the characters swing. So the movie ends up being an interpersonal drama, and you sympathize with everyone, even if they have done a "bad" thing. This is open to your judgement, for sure...a 1960s radical sentiment on the part of the left leaning director, Syndey Lumet, who had the early uber-classic "12 Angry Men" as well as "Serpico" and many others. It was Lumet who drew me to the film, but it was Phoenix who stole the show (and who breaks your heart knowing how young he commited suicide). Look for the kind of classic filming and editing you'd expect from this well-schooled director. It's a warm film, and it avoids pretensiousness and artifice, turning instead to the innate abilities of the actors, including a young Marth Plimpton. Plimpton is wonderful, and she is given some classic lines, funny and perceptive just as you'd expect this kind of girl to be. (Plimpton was in another movie with Phoenix, "The Mosquito Coast," two years earlier.) So watch this, for sure. It was nominated for a ton of awards, and overcomes what seems to be a contrived, tightly focussed impossibility of a plot and makes it work. Very well!

SnoopyStyle Teenager Danny Pope (River Phoenix) notices that people are following him and he initiates the family to go on the run again. His parents Annie (Christine Lahti) and Arthur (Judd Hirsch) had set fire to a weapons lab credited with creating Naplam in the sixties. The family including youngest son Harry find help from supporters as they set up new identities. Danny's piano talents intrigue music teacher Mr. Phillips who pushes him to audition for Juilliard. He also catches the eye of the teacher's daughter Lorna Phillips (Martha Plimpton). River Phoenix is simply magnetic and Martha Plimpton is sweetly compelling. They have terrific chemistry together in a dramatic coming-of-age movie. The father son relationship could have been pushed harder but it has many interesting moments. This is really a great showcase for a rising superstar.

dazfiddy Running on Empty is a gem of film, with some great performances, especially the late River Phoenix.This is one of those films in the late 1980s that looked back on the recent past. Mississippi Burning is another film that springs to mind.The Pope family are fugitives.They have been on the run from the FBI since the early 1970s.Arthur(Judd Hirsch)and Annie (Christine Lahti) were once student radicals who blew up a lab that produced weapons, as a protest against the Vietnam War. Think Weathermen Underground and you get the picture.Their act of terror resulted in a fatality. We meet met them years later, when they are the parents to two boys. One of them, Danny played by River Phoenix, is now a teenager. He is tired of running, never having time to put down roots or make real friends. Danny also has to assume a new identity each time the family move. Whilst enrolled at his latest school, Danny, under the alias of Michael Manfield comes to the attention of a music teacher who notices what a gifted piano player he is. The teacher's daughter Lorna(Martha Plimpton) also notices Danny and begins to fall for him.The scenes between Danny and Lorna are well done. He slowly lowers his guard and starts to trust herThis film covers so much ground. Its about identity, love and how your past can both trap and mould you. Danny learnt to appreciate music through his mother, Annie who was from a wealthy middle class family. She knows how good he could be, but can she and Arthur let him go? Can he keep running forever without being able to live his life?There are two stand out scenes for me in this film. Annie meets her father for the first time in years. She clearly rejected everything he stood and yet there is so much emotion between them. The other scene is the pivotal one where the Popes make a decision about Danny. It is a clear indication that River Phoenix would have been huge had he lived.Just watch the look in his eyes as they bid farewell.To execute that range of emotions, you got to have acting chops. River definitely had it.The late Sidney Lumet shows what a skilled film maker he was, taking a difficult subject matter and getting great performances from the main players.

jzappa The most unsettling part of the family setting their dog out into the street and telling the children it'll certainly find another home is that the children take it rather well. They've deserted family dogs before. And they've left whole lives behind more times than that. The Popes are a married couple who've been subversive since the '60s, and their children include Danny, a high school senior and has never known any other kind of routine. The Popes were implicated in radical politics.They destroyed a building, and there was a janitor they didn't know would be there. They've been fugitives ever since, switching towns and names, finding jobs that don't draw attention, learning to keep the kids home on picture day. The more they flee yesteryear, the more it's in their mindset. And now time is catching up. What, for instance, is Danny going to do? He is a talented pianist, and through one of his teachers he gains a Juilliard scholarship. But he can't collect it unless he supplies his high school transcripts, which are strewn back along countless towns under countless different names.Judd Hirsch's Arthur Pope has taken an uncompromising position for decades, and he's not prepared to change now. He deems that the family must remain together, must safeguard itself against the world. He has created a stronghold psychology, and Danny shares it. He understands that if he confesses and enrolls at Juilliard, he'll never see his family again. His mother, Christine Lahti's Annie, will be heartbroken. She has been fleeing for ages without lamenting the forfeits she made, but she can't accept the idea that Danny will have to surrender his future, just as she lost hers.Life, for the time being, continues. Danny makes a girlfriend, whose father is conveniently the music teacher. They share secrets, but Danny can't share his biggest one. This is the first time he's had a girlfriend, the first time he's let anyone become this close, and he has to learn to confide without being truthful. Plimpton knows something's off, but not exactly what. The family has outlasted each close shave with the Feds, each question from a loud-mouthed neighbor. But this is an impossible risk, as it derives from within: It's no longer feasible for these people to elude questioning the very practicalities on which they've made their lives.And that questioning causes the movie's emotional pinnacle, when Lahti calls her father and coordinates to meet him for lunch. Long ago, she hurt him irrevocably. She vanished for years. Now she wants her parents to assume Danny, so he can go to music school. She will lose her son, as her father lost her. It's ironic and heartbreaking, and by the end of the scene we have been through a choker. The one scene that doesn't work is the cheesy and lugubrious ensemble dinner scene where everyone breaks out into song. But in either case, Lumet is showing us people who've chosen and are observing the cost, and throughout the film they'll have to reassess their assessments.Lumet was one of America's best directors, and his expertise here is in the way he takes a histrionic plot and makes it truthful by making it exclusive. All of the supporting characters are persuasive, mainly Plimpton and her father. And there are impressive performances in the principal roles. Phoenix largely bears the story. It's about him. Lahti and Hill have that devastating scene together. And Lahti and Hirsch, clustered together in bed, realizing in terror that they may have reached a turning point, are poignant. We see how they've relied on one another.The family is not actually political at all. Politics, interestingly, have been left far behind. That sort of commitment would reveal the Popes. The film is a tender, moving drama in which a choice must be made between staying together or splitting apart and perhaps realizing a long-deferred possibility. The parents never met whatever potential they had, owing to their fugitive life. Now, are they warranted in making their son forsake his own future?