Cinema
Running on Empty `15' Selected cinemas
Uncommon criminals
Hilary Mantel
The Pope family resemble, on the sur- face, 'a little Norman Rockwell family'. They live in a small town; Arthur (Judd Hirsch) is a cook, his wife Annie (Christine Lahti) takes what work she can get. The teenage son has a bicycle and a baseball bat. His ten-year-old brother has a mop of curls and an endearing grin.
But in this family normal pleasures and normal obligations are never enjoyed for long. Fifteen years ago, when their elder child was two, Arthur and Annie bombed a military research lab which was developing napalm for use in Vietnam. Unknown to them, a janitor was in the building; he was left blind and paralysed. Since then they have been on the run. Every time they believe the FBI are on their track they have to move on, changing their names, changing their appearances. Their official records, they tell people, have been lost in moving or destroyed in fires. The art they have perfected is the art of lying, and this is the inheritance they have passed on to their children.
Danny, the elder boy, has found himself a girlfriend in their latest town. She is the daughter of his music teacher; he is a talented pianist. His school and his own friends are asking him what he intends to do about a college place. He has passed beyond the stage of life where his parents can provide an identity for him. Yet they are afraid that if they let him go — to college, to the claims of other relationships — they will see him only in snatched meetings set up by the shadowy network of old sixties revolutionaries who have sus- tained them during their years of duplicity and flight.
The premise is dramatic; and the strength of Sidney Lumet's film resides in its performances, especially the perform- ance of River Phoenix as Danny. This 18-year-old actor began to build his reputa- tion in Stand by Me and The Mosquito Coast. Danny, a guarded, over-polite boy, could have been portrayed through a selec- tion of mannerisms; but Phoenix seems to have thought himself into his character to an unusual degree. Given intelligent scripts, he should have a bright future.
The problem is that, having set up his characters and their situation, the film- maker has no great curiosity about them. We want to ask a thousand questions about the Popes, and what brought them to this state of crisis. Their present day psycholo- gy we understand well enough. Mother is tired; she would stop running, and serve her gaol term, if the children did not depend on her. Father is a hard-liner still. When Danny is invited to a concert of chamber music, he denounces it as `bourgeois crap'. Grown up into a father, the revolutionary does not want his son to challenge his own authority. 'Who do you think you are, General Patton?' Danny asks him.
But the present-day Popes cannot be the product of one single action, one single decision; they existed before their crime. The genesis of that crime is hidden from us, and for much of the time its nature is not discussed. They might be bank- robbers, or drug dealers, or any kind of criminal described as 'common'. At a late stage in the film, Annie Pope is reunited with her father, and talks about her 'act of conscience' designed to 'stop the war'. Was she so simple that she believed a single act of sabotage could have that effect? Or did it seem to her that if she could not stop the war she should stand up and be counted against it? Why did the Popes act, while others of their generation only talked? The film's failure to address these ques- tions makes it a timid and feeble effort, shifting uneasily between action movie, family drama and teen romance. The scent of danger, which should be overpowering, is entirely absent. There is worse on the screen at the moment; but this seems like a good idea gone to waste.
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