Inadvands Boring, over-political, tech fuzed mess

Comwayon A Disappointing Continuation

Borgarkeri A bit overrated, but still an amazing film

ChampDavSlim The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

frankenbenz 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.

Brian T. Whitlock (GOWBTW) Family strife happens everywhere, in "The Indian Runner" it explains itself very well. Here you have two brothers one's a sheriff(David Morse) who handles problems; a Vietnam veteran(Viggo Mortensen) who is a problem. Joe Roberts is a sheriff who looks a life in a very positive way despite crime. Frank Roberts is a Vietnam vet who is so distraught, he can't function in society. He's hot-headed, rebellious, and mean-spirited. Things really go downhill when their father(Charles Bronson) commits suicide. Then Frank makes things even worse when he goes out to a bar, and killed a guy with a chair. Not only that, he leaves his wife and his newborn son. He would a been a great father if he hasn't been such a hot-head. It goes to say, "You got a lot to learn" Frank will be learning things the hard, HARD WAY! The nighttime scenes are cool. I like the part where the Indian runs across the road. The movie makes sense, and it's got some meaning to go along with. 5 stars!

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU It is a marvelous film for many reasons and it has many meaningful interpretations. The first we can think of is of course the effect of the Vietnam War on a normal man. It made him someone whose desire to kill, whose need to kill could never be controlled and dominated. Nothing could keep him within the limits of normalcy, that is to say a violence that is purely symbolical or superficial. His desire was not to punch a few noses and be done with it, but it was to kill, and I repeat that was a need for him to be satisfied in order to survive. The second line is that of the two brothers. One chose to be a cop and he killed legally. That's not in anyway easy, but at least you can come to terms with it: you saved your life from someone who wanted to kill you, and that was legal. You can wonder why he shot to kill, right in the heart, but he was entirely justified to shoot, so why not to kill? The other chose to go to Vietnam and there he killed but it was never to really save his life, never really justified because it was not self defense on his own turf but aggression in a foreign country, and the killing was not exactly shooting at combatants, but more often at women and children. This seems to prove that the desire to kill is in any man, good or bad, and that the only choice you have is to do it legally and morally or not. Vietnam produced twisted, distorted and completely warped personalities for whom killing had become a need, just like alcohol or smoking for others. This leads to a confrontation between the two brothers and the dilemma for the cop who has to arrest or shoot his own brother. He chose differently. The third line is metaphorical. The guilt the cop had built in himself after killing the young chap who was running away and then started to shoot at him can only come out, be retrieved and rehabilitated if in a way or another the need to kill is projected into someone else and that someone else is forced to go away. The guilt has to be entrusted to some Indian runner who will take it away as if it were a message he has to go dump in the ocean or the infinite. But this meaning is metaphorically symbolical of us all. We all have to get rid of this death instinct, and here comes the ending of the film. It is a dream society will let us go without making us pay for that death instinct. And the price is called guilt because we have to repress it and then it will go on lurking in our minds forever. There is no Indian runner for our death instinct, just a repressed guilt that may come out one day, but when and how no one knows.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines

skyhouse5 I have seen this film only once, on tape, and the ending therein found the child Frank brandishing his sixguns at his older brother at the county line? What struck me was the obvious fact that the only possible conclusion to this Cain/Abel story was Joe's killing of his own younger brother, the mirrored killing of another wastrel at the start of the tilm. Only this time it's Abel killing Cain. All the Casszvetes references aside, Sean Penn's film herein is one more argument in favor of an authentic filmmaker. There aren't many of these, in Hollywood or anywhere else. And, once more, it seems Viggo Mortensen has scored in his singular fashion. And David Morse holds his own as he does in the weirdly evocative "Green Mile" that somehow manages to deflate "black" heroes the while it is manifestly trying to celebrate them. But, then, the author of said, yawn, fable has NEVER established credits beyond weirdness, per se, including Jack Nicholson as the mad "writer."On second viewing, I see that I cannot add another "star," but fact of the matter is that Sean Penn's work here is absolutely masterfu, the subtleties, the ironies, the absolutely bang-on details of observation and "truth." And Morse is as fine as Mortensen, whose "Franky" is scarier than today's Russian mafioso in "Eastern Promises," and he was sporting tattoos way back when. Also, methinks Charles Bronson finally invested a fully-fleshed role as the father of a pair of "all-American" boys. Penn doesn't give any answers to the sociocultural conundrum, but he sure as Hell has pictured it to an absolute "T." "The Indian Runner" should prove the authentic American film classic it is."heeeere's Johnny????"