Whatever the qualities of his movie, at least director Sidney Lumet has a new idea here. A family of activists, forever on the run since bombing a napalm lab many years before (a man who shouldn't have been there was blinded and paralysed), meets its inevitable crisis of conscience when the elder of its two sons reaches 17 and feel other tugs of loyalty. These come for the boy (snub-nosed, slight River Phoenix, a most unlikely offspring of hook-nosed, thickset Judd Hirsch and steeple-tall Christine Lahti) in the form of a girlfriend (the Jodie Foster-ish Martha Plimpton) and the chance of a scholarship to improve his already impressive talents on the piano. It's a film of effective moments which just about outweigh the patches of tedium. Lahti is excellent as the mother, especially when meeting her father for the first time in 14 years and telling him she's 'sorry for having caused you so much pain'. Not all of the film's emotive moments, though, strike as true as this one.


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