Ang Lee’s brilliant film The Ice Storm eyed the osmotic flow of counterculture values into suburban America, and Sidney Lumet’s Running on Empty followed 1960s radicals still on the run almost 20 years later. Tanya Hamilton’s film, set in 1976, revolves around former Black Panther Marcus (Anthony Mackie), who returns to his former home in West Philadelphia when his father dies. There he finds varying reactions—a brother resenting his disappearance, a fellow Panther calling him “snitch,” and a friend and lawyer (Kerry Washington) offering to assist. Washington’s character, who defends Panthers but seems no longer to have her heart in the movement, is a widow who deflects her daughter’s questions about the past.
The best thing about the film is its portrayal of the era, although clearly the low budget prevented better known songs from being used. (The Roots contribute a score, however.) The Panther movement as portrayed has devolved into a vestige of itself, its leaders imprisoned, as Marcus was, or mellowed out, as he is, its remaining followers without an agenda other than nihilism. Mostly white cops patrol the middle-class neighborhood with little attempt to integrate themselves into its fabric. It is an era of decline in old cities like Philadelphia.
Hamilton paces the film deliberately, holding back on revealing the circumstances by which Marcus wound up in prison, and how his former colleague was killed. Meanwhile, the presence of Marcus forces the young mother into her own kind of self-examination. I might have wished for there to be more about the Panther movement and what it meant to these characters and what it meant to the United States. Nonetheless, I appreciated the movie’s lack of an agenda in depicting this fading bit of history.
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viewed 12/24/10 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 12/27/10
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