Very Cool!!!

Simply A Masterpiece

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

I remember my first time listening to Nebraska, the second Bruce Springsteen record I discovered, (after Born to Run of course) laying in my bedroom, imagining each song play out in my mind. That's one of the most appealing aspects of all of Bruce's work, the imagery he projects in your mind. Listening to his music is like closing your eyes and watching a short film play out. One of the most vivid images from the album is the closing verse of the song Highway Patrol Man, from which Sean Penn's directorial debut, The Indian Runner, was inspired.''It was out at the crossroads, down round Willow bank Seen a Buick with Ohio plates behind the wheel was Frank Well I chased him through them county roads till a sign said Canadian border five miles from here I pulled over the side of the highway and watched his taillights disappear.''Penn's film, which he also scripted, begins with the narrator of the Springsteen song, Joe Roberts (David Morse) preparing for the return of his wayward brother, Frank (Viggo Mortenson) from Vietnam. The cast of supporting characters make up the rest of Joe's family, his wife (Valeria Golino) and his Mother (Sandy Dennis) and Father (Charles Bronson). Frank returns for only the briefest of periods and is gone again. A restless soul he returns to the road to keep at bay what he perceives to be the boredom and absurdity of day to day life. Quite like the Jack Nicholson character in Five Easy Pieces, Frankie is never far away from trouble, never far away from walking out on someone important in his life. He eventually returns with a girl, Dorothy (a fantastic Patricia Arquete), who's pregnant with his child. Frankie decides to make a stab at the kind of life his settled brother has established. But his nature is what it is and chaos is rarely far away from the troubled and semi psychotic Frankie.I mentioned Five Easy Pieces before and one of the things that struck me about this film, visually speaking, was that although made in 1991 it looks as if it was made in the seventies, in which it's set. I don't just mean that the car's and clothes are of the seventies, which of course they are. But the film itself looks as it was filmed in the seventies, reminding very me much of something like Badlands or indeed Five Easy Pieces. This is a commendable feat from the films photographer and this aspect gives The Indian Runner and its story a grainy authenticity. The story starts off at a slow pace and in the first half hour I wasn't sure if I was going to like it or not. But Penn gradually pushes up a few gears to tell a painful yet engrossing story about the relationship between these two brothers and how that relationship is defined by their contrasting perspectives of life. Joe is the guy next door, a good man with a wife, a child and a steady job. When Joe is called to use his fire arm in the course of duty he knows he does the right thing but still suffers from the guilt of the action. Frankie is restless and cannot subscribe to Joes happy and settled life. He's a candle burning at both ends and no matter how much Joe tries to encourage otherwise, all Frankie can see is the pain and the negativity in the world. Add to that a venomous temper and Frankie becomes a difficult person to love.Penn accompanies Joe and Frankie with a solid set of fully rounded supporting characters containing just as much depth as the two leads. There's Charlton Heston as Mr. Roberts, Joe and Frankie's father, who plays the angry and somewhat spiteful role with expert subtlety. Patricia Arquette is wonderfully quirky in one of the most intriguing roles in the film, as Frankie's girlfriend, Dorothy. Valeria Golino plays Joe's wife Maria, and their relationship and love appears both genuine and authentic.The Indian Runner starts off slow but it soon enough pulls us in to an absorbing and not so much an expected straight forward story of this brotherly relationship and how our differing points of view can both define and destroy relationships we have in life. It's also a story of trying to help those who cannot and do not want to help themselves which is always a captivating one.

There is something in most of us, especially guys, that admires some really working class small town "real men" populist fare. And Sean Penn serves it up for us with a cherry on top. Hey, A lot of people use Penn as a political whipping boy, but I don't rate movies or actor/directors based on politics or personality. That is what right wing commentators like excretable faux movie reviewer Debbie Schlussel does. While acknowledging he is one of our best actors and a good director, I think this picture was a simplistic piece of aimless dreck that he has atoned for since. Okay, you have the gist of this there is this good cop, a small town trooper, Joe, played against type by David Morse, who in the opening scene chases some guy on a country farm road in big sixties cars. The bad guy stops, gets out, shoots at him so Joe has to blast him dead. There was no explanation what drove this man to do such a desperate violent thing and the dead man's parents do some redneck freak out at the police station while Joe feels real sad and guilty that he had to kill someone. So we know that Joe, the farmer forced off his land into a cop job, is a good basic sort of guy. Then his brother Frank shows up, he is a sadistic, amoral bully, fresh out of the Army and Nam where the war got his blood lust up. Some people here and in other reviews called him just an irresponsible hell raising younger brother and Sean was trying to make some point about what our John Wayne tough guy culture and war does to otherwise good people but what I saw was an amoral, sadistic bully who enjoys hurting and ripping people off. Then there is mom and dad, Marsha Mason and Charles Bronson, who do the requisite turn as old fashioned country couple, then die off; she by illness and he by shotgun suicide, to advance the story for us. Both times Frank the bad guy is away being a miserable SOB. But good Joe brings him back to Podunksville from jail so Frank can straighten his life out by welding bridges and living with his utterly stupid screaming trashy pregnant wife. But Joe has a nice wife, played by Italian actress Valeria Golina, who is Mexican and Sean uses this as an exercise in some affirmative action embellishment of goody Joe and his real soulfulness underneath his uniform and crew cut. For me, that was an utterly pointless affirmative action subplot that Sean uses to burnish his tough guy creds by sucking up to Mexicans because Mexicans are so tough and cool.But Frank is bad and we get the requisite events like stealing friend's car, robbing gas station by beating the clerk over the head then torching the car and all those cool things that hell raisers do. Then there are the mandatory 8mm film childhood flashbacks of young Joey dutifully moving the lawn and cowboy dressed Franky jumping on his back and wrestling him and yadda yadda so we all know what deep bond there is between the two of them.So the film meanders around with a lot of small town schlock to warm the heart of any red stater. Accompanying the film was a great soundtrack of good sixties songs like Jefferson Airplane and Janis Joplin which were totally inappropriate, except for the 60's era effect, to win the hearts of old hippies. The worst offense is that, since the movie was inspired by a Springsteen song, "The Highway Patrolman", that song was not included. So Joe's brain dead wife goes into labor and Joe runs off to the bar to get loaded and spout some populists drunken victim's spiel about how tough things are while good Joey comes to drag him back to his wife. The bartender is good Ole Ceasar, played by Dennis Hopper. So Viggo - Frank whigs out for no particular reason and beats his pal Ceasar to death after good Joe the Cop leaves.So Joe has chase his bad brother down and I was so hoping that he would do the right thing and blow that menace to society away. Instead we get a scene where his brother stops ahead of him in some old 50's junker on some lonely road at night, and little Franky in his cowboy suit and cap guns gets out of the car to face good Joe, the kid from the 8mm flashback home movie sequence. Oy, such dreck! Then to top off this drecky sap fest, there is some Zen crap about the Indian runner, who is a messenger, becomes the message, ala Marshall MacLuhen? See what I mean, Sean has done much better than this so don't be afraid to miss this one.

Love him or hate him, Sean Penn demands respect. Acting accolades aside, Penn established himself as a director with immense potential with 1991's The Indian Runner. Channeling the works of John Cassavetes and Bob Rafelson, IR is a complex character study inspired by Bruce Springsteen's "Highway Patrolman." Set in the late 1960's / early 1970's, IR is an homage to American New Wave cinema, a movement that helped revolutionize Hollywood. Penn's nostalgia for what is arguably the greatest decade in American film-making history is undeniable and translates so convincingly on the screen, IR could easily be mistaken for a film made twenty years before it was. From IR's muted palette, it's washed out colors, to the painstaking detail of the production design, Penn managed to craft a near perfect American film.The story of two very different brothers, one calm the other rough, is heartbreaking and emotionally raw. David Morse and Viggo Mortenson who play the two brothers, turn in flawless performances that are tortured, haunting and impossible to look away from. Penn's writing is stark, realistic, subtle and poignant all at once, hinting at the possibility he would help re-establish a lost tradition of small, straight forward, but intellectual complex films. But despite IR being cut from the same cloth as Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces, it proved to be a box office flop, unlike FEP which was a hit in 1970. Perhaps Penn's debut came 20 years too late, long after American audiences had forgotten about the Vietnam War and right after they'd grown complacent with Reaganomics or Bush 1's New World Order. Or perhaps IR was made 17 years too early, where today's climate is as soured by a pointless war as it was back in 1970. Time warps aside, Sean Penn should be respected for writing and directing one of the better American films made in the last 38 years.

Really one of the best films in recent American cinema. Definitely Sean Penn's ode to the seventies and personal films. A terrifically acted heart-wrenching tale of family during the Vietnam war. David Morse should be a bigger star. If you have only seen Vigo in large Hollywood films I urge you to catch his amazing performance here. Charles Bronson is amazing as the father. Seldom has a genre actor been used so well in a drama. Patricia Arquette and Benicio Del Toro both launched their careers here. Additionally loved the small "townspeople" in the film. Very real, very strange. It would be easy to root against an "in" Hollywood actor making his directorial debut - however this film is such an amazing find and I consider it a modern classic.