Running on Empty.

IT IS ALMOST impossible to make a serious movie in Hollywood these days. (Actually, it wasn't much easier before.) If the idea is a potentially good one, such as that of Running on Empty, the following requirements are sure to reduce it to pap by the time it comes off the production line.

1. The picture must not offend anyone. The story of Arthur and Annie Pope, who bombed a governmentsponsored laboratory that made napalm for the Vietnam War, and who have been living on the run with their two sons, was triggered by the actual bombing of the mathematics building at the University of Wisconsin, where a graduate student, working late, was killed. In the movie, the victim was a janitor (less valuable than a grad student), and he was only blinded and crippled (no actual blood on the Popes' hands): the Popes need the blessing and forgiveness of the audience.

2. It must have something for everyone. Let's make Artie Jewish because so many radicals were, including, I dare say, the film's director (Sidney Lumet) and writer (Naomi Foner) and their families, as well as many moviegoers. Let's, however, be sure to make Annie not only Christian but also a runaway debutante-a WASP formerly in best standing-so we can make sure of the rest of the audience, especially those proper Republicans whose children rebel.

Weathermen and such, who went in for bombing and then went underground, were not burdened with offspring; but a whole family on the lam makes the movie a family picture, commercially very desirable. If the family survives by changing towns, names, low-paying jobs-well, that makes them appealing to the proletarians in the audience. If we see them moving from Florida to New Jersey, if a few scenes are shot in New York City streets, this makes the movie saleable abroad as a quasi-travelogue. But just how deadly dull those jobs-Annie's as a doctor's receptionist, Artie's as a short-order cook-are must not be gone into.

3. Some element in the film must make it attractive to youth, the biggest group of moviegoers. So it is 17-yearold Dan Pope who becomes the center of attention: he is a musical genius. With initial lessons ftom his mother and constant practice on a portable soundless keyboard, he can elicit from a briefly encountered Steinway the most gorgeous Beethoven or Chopin. So, at his latest school, Mr. Phillips, his music teacher, wants to recommend him for Juilliard, and the boy is itching to go. But he loves his boorish, unreconstructedly and infantilely radical father too much to leave him. What keeps volatile Artie going in his underground existence is a loving wife and boy (Harry, the younger, is only ten and not yet supportive).

But today's young, divided as they are, don't just want an obedient, respectful son; they also need a rebel. So the movie provides one from column B. Mr. Phillips's daughter, Lorna, who falls for Dan as he does for her, is a hellion who treats her doting, cowed father with exemplary disrespect. Let him so much as enter her room without knocking and he gets her lip, if not the back of her hand. This elicits Dan's admiration, even as the sticky cohesion of the Pope family stirs up Lorna's longings. The formulaic, manipulative script manages to have it both was.

4. Indeed, the film must have it both ways about everything. Though Dan is a studious, dedicated classical pianist, he is not some sort of acned, highbrow nerd, No, as played by handsome and virile River Phoenix, he plays baseball and knows pop music, too; he will even tap his foot when Mr. Phillips plays some of it in musicappreciation class. (If high-school classes are indeed as much fun as shown here, we are in serious trouble.)

Notice especially how "the Revolution" is treated in the movie. The laboratory bombing emerges as a onetime lark that accidentally went sour. Since then the three (later four) Popes have been living in close harmony, with only Arthur inveighing against capitalist evils such as the chambermusic concert he wants to keep Dan from attending. Warm remembrance of flings past surfaces when, at Annie's birthday party, the Popes and Lorna dance to James Taylor's "Fire and Rain" in the most down-home American way, complete with victrola, paper hats, candle blowing, and inexpensive presents as prescribed by Artie, either found (sea shells) or homemade (whales carved from bits of wood).

Dan, 17, and Harry, ten, driven from pillar to post in the family van, remain pure as the driven snow despite all that name-changing, hairdyeing, having to drop everything and run from the Feds. No school problems, drug problems, sibling rivalry. How they manage to get into new schools each time without records from the former ones (We lost our papers in a fire), how new passports and identities are acquired by their parents-not to mention how wages are paid in cash-is adumbrated but not made believable. The kids don't even know what their parents' crime was or who their grandparents are until they find out ftom a newspaper article; but none of this makes them neurotic or intractable.

Yet tormented Arthur does needlessly heckle, yell at, boss around dutiful Dan-the one bad effect the underground life seems to have. But, never fear, he can also be wonderfully understanding: "You sleep with [Lorna]?" "Yeah." "Okay. Now hit the sack; you've got school tomorrow."

5. The film needs to appear daring while playing it safe. So Annie tells her staunchly conventional millionaire father, whom she meets for lunch at a fancy restaurant where he is well known (to make the scene more photogenic, though in reality such a meeting would have to be inconspicuous), that as soon as her younger son is old enough, she will give herself up, even if she cannot vouch for Artie's following suit. A good woman, truly repentant about that bombing-"Don't you think there were times when I'd have blinded and paralyzed myself to take that back?"-she doesn't permit herself the luxury of going to jail as long as maternal duty requires otherwise. As for Artie's being less reliably repentant-isn't that a proof of the film's adultness, its sense of reality?

Talk about reality! There is also an unrepentant Sixties radical, the evil Gus Winant (played as a caricature by the untalented L. M. Kit Carson), who tries to put the make on Annie, with whom he once had an affair, even as he attempts to get the Popes to help him with a potentially murderous bank robbery by means of the arsenal he proudly displays in the trunk of his car. If Arthur is not noble enough, perhaps, ever to give himself up, at least he is superior to Gus.

6. Tears must be jerked. When Dan, in New York for his Juilliard audition, stumbles on his grandparents' address, he spends his scant money on a large pizza and, pretending to be the delivery boy, rings the grandparental doorbell. Grandmother answers, looks warmly at the strange, lovely boy, and offers to buy the pizza she didn't order. Dan gazes yearningly at the kindly, elegant old lady but neither accepts her money (attaboy!) nor reveals his identity (sob!). At the lunch with Daddy, Annie fights contradictory emotions but chokes back her tears. Daddy is full of reproaches, yet agrees to look after Dan should he get into Juilliard. As Annie leaves (without having gorged herself on food unavailable to her loved ones), tough, righteous, self-righteous Daddy erupts into strangulated sobs.

There is a farewell scene, now that it's fleeing time again, for the young lovers that won't leave a heartstring strung or a hankie unwrung, even though we can guess that Dan won't have to leave. But his parents don't just tell him this. He must sadly jump into the pick-up truck for which Artie has exchanged the van ("Keep them guessing!") and still more sadly toss out, when ordered, his beloved bike. Only then is he, for a meretricious effect, told to jump out after it and head for his grandparents' and Juilliard. Earlier we were told that the Popes blew up the lab because they wanted "to make a difference." Now Arthur tells Dan, "Go out there and make a difference," implying with a selfabnegating smile that blowing minds at Carnegie Hall does as much for social justice as blowing up labs.

7. Very little about Running on Empty stands up to any sort of scrutiny, and almost none of the dialogue transcends platitude. That, I fear, is the seventh prerequisite for a current serious movie, lest it be too demanding for today's illiterate audiences, both lower and upper class.

Judd Hirsch makes Artie's interior as unappealing as his ant-eaterish exterior. One yearns for a shred of sensitivity, a touch of charm to explain what Annie saw in him. In vain. Conversely, the excellent Christine Lahti brings genuine down-to-earth humanity to her preposterous role in a phony script. River Phoenix, as an actor, just flows along (or goes with the flow) and doesn't look like Hirsch's boy by a long shot, never mind a close-up. As Lorna, Martha Plimpton is better, but what can the kids do in scenes that, despite a fake harsh touch or two, are glowing with the aura and smell of calculated innocence? At the end, the soundtrack reprises "Fire and Rain": this is not a movie that lets go of its gaffes easily.