In honor of Sidney Lumet's passing, I thought I should write up one of his films. I didn't even have to ask myself which one to choose - I knew it would be Running on Empty. Sure, it helped that I'd already reviewed one of my other favorite Lumets, The Verdict, and that I had a recently purchased VHS copy of Running on Empty sitting around waiting to be watched. The movie's premise doesn't hurt either: it deals with a family on the run from the law, because the parents participated in a terrorist action fifteen years earlier at the height of their radical activism. I'm a sucker for films about the sixties, particularly those that deal with the decade from a bittersweet, semi-nostalgic distance of twenty or so years - see my essay on Field of Dreams, which focuses exclusively on this angle.
I wrote then about "a late 80s trend: the ascension of the baby boom generation to Hollywood's height of power, accompanied by a burst of 60s nostalgia which helped (re-)define the era for a generation [represented] by 'thirtysomething' and 'The Wonder Years' on TV, big hits like The Big Chill and smaller films like Running on Empty (among others) in the cinema, as well as cultural events like the 20th anniversary of Woodstock and the release of the Beatles catalog on CD." The point of these enterprises - with the exception of the musical commemorations - was not so much to relive the era as to resituate its legacy, and those who experienced it, in the context of a later time period and the onset of middle age.
Yet I don't think this is why I'm so fond of Running on Empty - in a way the sociocultural connection seems almost incidental. At heart, the film is timeless in its feel and universal in its application; as with most powerful drama, it is simply a heightening and exaggeration of something everyone experiences - growing up, breaking away from your parents, and on the flip side letting your children go. The stars of the movie are not really Christina Lahti or Judd Hirsch as the fugitive mom and dad, but rather River Phoenix as the sensitive, gifted teenage son who loves his parents but yearns for a life of his own.
