November 22, 1991 | Joe Roberts (David Morse) is the good brother. Without him saying a word about it, you know — you just know — he didn’t ask for the role, but has played it dutifully well, accepting it as his fate, for all his life.
Joe is a police officer in his small Nebraska town, and the job of peacekeeper suits him. Sometimes, though, the job calls for more than integrity and good intentions. In the opening minutes of The Indian Runner, Joe must shoot, and kill, a suspect in self-defense.
Frank Roberts (Viggo Mortensen) is the bad brother, the black sheep with a tripwire temper. He is savagely bemused as he notes the uneasiness he inspires in everyone — his family, his co-workers, his childlike girlfriend. And yet, for all his gaudy tattoos and outlaw posturing, Frank is a lost soul, a man in pain. At least, that’s the way Joe sees him. Or, to put it more precisely, how Joe wants to see Frank, until the good brother can no longer fool himself.
Loosely based on Bruce Springsteen’s ‘‘Highway Patrolman,’’ a bleakly evocative song from his Nebraska album, The Indian Runner is a work of uncommon power, substance, and authority. It unfolds slowly, grippingly, as it builds toward a seemingly inevitable climax — and then, audaciously, it pulls the rug out from under the audience’s expectations.
That’s just one of the surprises Sean Penn has up his sleeve, as the mercurial young actor makes a smashingly successful debut on the other side of the cameras as writer and director. Throughout Indian Runner, Penn vividly evokes the in-your-face intensity and volatile emotions common to films by the late, great John Cassavetes (one of the people whose influence Penn graciously acknowledges in the closing credits).
And like Cassavetes, Penn fully appreciates the value of simply watching and waiting, of keeping the cameras turning just a few seconds longer, while he allows his actors time to offer that precisely revealing gesture, that sudden expression of love or hate or fear.
Indian Runner stumbles only when Penn doesn’t trust the simplicity of his storytelling technique, or the eloquence of the performances from his excellent cast, and takes an unwise dive into deep-dish symbolism. The title is all too literally represented in some fantasy sequences that, unfortunately, resemble outtakes of equally heavy-handed moments from Oliver Stone’s The Doors. Penn is on much safer ground when he curbs his taste for visual hyperbole, and goes straight to the heart of the matter in the working-class milieu of small-town Nebraska.
Viggo Mortensen has the flashier role, and gives the more harrowing performance, as the volatile Frank, a self-destructive hellraiser who returns from Vietnam as a leaner and meaner timebomb. (The movie is set in 1968.) But David Morse has the more complex role, and makes the more compelling impression.
As Joe, Morse must convey decency and contentment without seeming smug, without making it incredible that, on some level, Frank might actually envy his brother’s happiness. (Joe in turn admits that he, too, would like to run wild and reckless sometimes.) It’s a daunting challenge, but Morse is excellent, revealing a lifetime of nervous dread, fierce love, and conflicting loyalties each time Joe gazes at Frank.
Better still, Penn brings out an unexpected and deeply affecting vulnerability in, of all people, Charles Bronson, who’s cast as the sad-eyed father of the Roberts brothers. Bronson plays the elder Roberts as a man who probably was a hard and demanding parent when Joe and Frank were boys, but who now seems defeated and confused by life. (The Roberts, we discover, used to be a farming family, but lost their land to the local banks.) Bronson makes the most of a small but significant role, as does Sandy Dennis in the even smaller role of Bronson’s ailing wife.
The supporting cast also includes Dennis Hopper as a tough bartender — who, as it turns out, is not quite tough enough — and Patricia Arquette as Frank’s spaced-out and very pregnant lover. Valeria Golino shines in a few key moments as Joe’s loving wife, Maria, a Mexican woman whom Joe married years ago, over the objections of his father. Penn doesn’t make a big deal about it, but he does make it clear that the marriage probably was the first (and maybe even the only) act of defiance Joe ever considered in his entire life. For his part, Joe’s father comes to accept Maria and, in one of the movie’s most touching moments, apologizes to his son for ever speaking unkindly of her.
Blood ties are of paramount importance in The Indian Runner. In this, the movie takes its cue from Springsteen’s song: ‘‘A man who turns his back on his family, well, he just ain’t no good.’’ It’s hard to be a good man in the world Penn shows us. But it’s even harder for some men — men like Joe — to stop trying.
