Running With Heart in N.J.
Running Scared
directed by Wayne Kramer
Don't believe Quentin Tarantino's hype in the ads for Running Scared: "This is moviemaking from the pelvis!" This terrific movie goes against everything Tarantino stands for. Director Wayne Kramer (The Cooler) has made an exhilarating action movie that, unlike Tarantino's, is full of moral consequence.
In Running Scared, New Jersey drug dealer Joey Gazelle (Paul Walker) searches frantically for a gun he stashed away after a shoot-out with undercover narcs. The weapon was pilfered by his young son's best friend, Oleg (Cameron Bright), an abused kid who used the .45 caliber to prevent another beating from his sadistic Russian-immigrant stepfather. Sound bad-ass? It's actually moviemaking from the heart.
Running Scared is one continuous chase sequence, keeping pace with Joey's frantic recovery effort. Along the way, Joey encounters a cavalcade of low-life characters that test his moral foundation while his wife, son, his young charge from next door-and us in the audience-gape at his relentlessness. This is not a misuse of cinematic sensationalism. Rather, Kramer keeps the audience revved-up in order to awaken their dormant sense of responsibility and justice and, in the process, makes the connection between action and virtue that Tarantino has neglected.
In Kramer's script the topic of abused children is addressed in parallel occurrences, rhyming episodes and contrasting character types is fascinating to watch. Not a panoply of malevolent pranks like Pulp Fiction, the film's an ever-deepening, head-spinning saga of trust, fidelity and good-faith exhibited by Joey and his family in the midst of a world gone haywire.
Realizing that contemporary cinema has gone wrong, Kramer makes a better, more sophisticated redress of genre convention than was seen in Todd Haynes' tepid art film Far From Heaven, with more meaningful action tropes than those spasms of easily forgotten "pleasure" in Peter Jackson's King Kong.
Running Scared's action sequences challenge one's perception and sensitivity. Oleg's gunplay is shown in a slo-mo flashback that repeats the details of the event. The visual extravagance analyzes the gun shot trajectory while also connecting the crisis in Oleg's home to Joey's domestic unease with his own rebellious son and infirm father. Kramer's technique suggests almost psychic recall; its penetrating demonstration of a child's panic links emotionally to an adult's lingering Oedipal crisis. In this way, Running Scared's hyped-up imagery provides more than sensationalism: It illustrates a search for common humanity.
Certain acts of kindness and rescue (Oleg encountering a hooker studying for her GED, white guy Joey infiltrating the no-man's-land of a Latino ghetto) have unusual humor and depth. It harkens back to the visionary Americana of directors like Brian DePalma, Walter Hill and Sam Peckinpah. When Running Scared's end-credits include an eyebrow-raising dedication to Peckinpah, DePalma and Hill, it is not a coincidence but a confirmation. Kramer has the guts-and the talent-to salute a trio of filmmakers who represent the epitome of action-film-as-art even though their sincere pizzazz has lost respect in the current era of smart/smug criticism.
Peckinpah, DePalma and Hill's visually astonishing films are great because they are not just exhibitionistic, not just formal; their postmodern formalism is soulful. That's what Kramer continues in his rapid-edited homages: a laundry room sex scene (DePalma), a hockey rink massacre (Peckinpah), a culture-clash between a dispossessed immigrant and a faithful patriot (Hill).
Throughout Running Scared, Kramer demonstrates such a high, knowing level of film craft that when the movie seems to jump off the reel and burns (as in Bergman's Persona) or the music score emulates a Sergio Leone twang, even the least sophisticated viewer will sense that the plot has been hiked up into purposeful surreality. The film's surging, impassioned aestheticism obliterates that idiotic '90s notion of movies as thrill rides. Instead, Kramer's storytelling evokes emotions you can practically touch.