Progressive Wednesday

The TGIF Movie Review: The Indian Runner

The Indian Runner, the first film written and directed by the brilliant Sean Penn, tells the story of two brothers, Joe (played by David Morse) and Frank (played with vitriol and intensity by Viggo Mortensen) and their inability to connect on the basic elements of life: love, family, peace vs. violence, and morality. But besides being a film tackling the tough topic of familial disagreements, this is really a story about the Vietnam War.

Frank is a returning vet when we first meet him, and as the film unfolds, I couldn’t help but think: he’s doing “this” because of what he saw and what he did during the war. Any sense of innocence and deep feelings of love were sucked away for him “over there.” For Frank, life is meaningless, a series of empty events — he tries desperately to believe otherwise, but can’t shake away his nihilism. Joe, on the other hand, abhors the violence of his job (he’s a cop), and centers his life on his love of family, and his contentment from routine (morning coffee, newspaper, dinner with his clan). They serve as his escape from the job, from the farm he once ran and still pines for.

Penn shoots the film with a kind of grainy quality – “ making this a period piece of a sort, and a reminder that life isn't clean and crisp. And he creates in Frank, a messenger that some experience can make it difficult to want to experience more. In Joe, he offers up, in some ways, the opposite: some can take the mundane and live off that (like the central character in Hemingway's short story “The Big Two-Hearted River,– a story also about a returning veteran). Additionally, Joe knows what love is: it takes him on trips crossing multiple states; it makes him touch the blood of a loved-one lost; it makes him teach others through a kind of surprising toughness.

In the end we're not left with two choices, for this isn't a morality tale. Instead, we're left with one choice: the one we decide on our own.

A wee bit of a warning: this film contains some bloody violence and not-so-pleasant full-frontal nudity, but it’s worth the ending's gut-wrenching payoff.