The Runner is set in 2010, when New Orleans was still rebuilding from Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill further crippled the city’s economy and ecology. Congressman Colin Price (Nicolas Cage), the son of a former mayor, grows in popularity as a mouthpiece for the indignant city and is well positioned for a Senate run, until reports emerge that he slept with the wife of a fisherman he had attempted to help. Price falls dizzyingly off the fast track to national political prominence as his well-heeled allies abandon him and his wife and political partner, Deborah (Connie Nielson), walks out. Adrift and without resources, Price finds some degree of salvation in a relationship with a former aide (Sarah Paulson) and by pouring himself into a new foundation, performing the arduous task of helping people without resources receive damages claims. Freed from any responsibilities to corporate donors or media, Price rediscovers the moral, if not financial, rewards of being a true ally to the common man, but as his rehabilitation becomes more widely known (several jokes are made about Louisiana’s easy forgiveness to scandal-ridden politicians), corporate interests come calling to recruit Price to once again run for office, pushing him into the crosshairs of the same thorny dilemma the city at large faces – whether to hold the oil industry responsible for the devastation they have wrecked on the Gulf and by extension, people’s lives, or to play nice with the area’s largest employer in hopes of bringing more jobs back.
The Runner admirably shows the difficult moral choices that politicians must make simply to be elected and the speed with which bad choices can sink any public figure. Cage gives a restrained and relatively un-Cageian performance, effectively conveying the mixture of idealism and regret that allows Price to start his life over. Colin and Deborah make an interesting political marriage, a less sociopathic version of House of Card's Frank and Clair Underwood, but once Deborah, an attorney, walks out, Colin’s link to the dealmaking corporate world is severed and he must look to the past for a more human kind of politics, embodied by his father, Rayne (Peter Fonda). A New Orleans mayor once hugely popular as a Civil Rights champion, Rayne later disgraced himself through alcoholism, an affliction which Colin too must struggle to keep at bay. Visually a world apart from the sleek buildings and lifestyles of his son’s circle, Rayne lives in a decrepit old mansion, shamelessly drinking himself to death and looking at the world with bitterness and scorn. Fonda is terrific, a haunting presence choking on bile, whose specter confronts Colin generally as he too falls from grace, and more specifically every time he sees a bottle.
For all of its good performances and interesting politics, The Runner’s structure and resolution render it somewhat unsatisfying. The first four fifths of the movie establish an unruly tangle of personal and political complications, but then the resolution comes at such stunning speed that you might be left blinking when it cuts to black (although some might enjoy the final shot, which lets an image speak louder than all the film’s characters). Still, unlike most other films and TV, The Runner treats modern politics not as a stage for the triumph of dewy-eyed optimists or for ideology-free gamesmanship, but as the difficult and morally fraught arena that it is. This is the debut as a writer and director for Austin Stark, who has produced some of the stronger indies of the last few years, and hopefully he has stronger films to come.
