Review of Running on Empty

The title kind of mirrors my reaction to this well written, well acted (with one exception noted below), sensitive drama. This is the third time I've seen it and it's not wearing particularly well. Maybe it's that I'm getting older and more conservative and thus find it harder to sympathize, let alone empathize, with a Weather Underground couple. Or maybe it's that when you take Sidney Lumet out of the world of NYC institutional corruption you render him kind of ordinary ("The Hill" honorably excepted). For whatever reason I found scenes that I once considered moving...the father/daughter exchange between Christine Lahti and Steven Hill in the restaurant and Lahti's birthday party..to be on the cloying, even hokey, side. Actually, the parts that have aged best for me do not involve the radical parents but rather the River Phoenix/ Martha Plimpton relationship. Lumet's directorial pacing and Naomi Foner's dialogue in these parts seem to be more relaxed and not trying to push the film's relentless and obvious point that the 60s are dead but, instead, simply depict two intelligent, interesting people of different socio economic backgrounds falling in love.

Three things that have not changed for me about this film are the rather undistinguished cinematography that gives it a TV movie-ish look, the desire to shake producer/writer Foner for titling the film after a Jackson Browne song but not using him instead of sappy James Taylor to score the thing, and the usual Hambone 101 performance of Judd Hirsch.

Bottom line: Maybe in ten years, when I'm in my second childhood, I'll love this film again. B minus.