![[Choice Cuts]](ruth970106.gif)
With broad strokes and too-even hands,
"Citizen Ruth" tries to turn
the abortion debate into comedy.
Directed by Alexander PayneM O V I E S | “ C I T I Z E N R U T H ”
By NELL BERNSTEIN
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Is abortion funny yet? With "Citizen Ruth," first-time filmmaker Alexander Payne seems to be crossing his fingers. But his satiric take on the public battle over abortion rights is either too early, too late, or just not clever enough to to transmute a still-smoldering controversy into a wacky comedy.
Laura Dern's Ruth is a destitute "huffer" — addicted to glue, paint and anything else she can sniff out of a paper bag — and mother of four children, none of whom are in her custody. When the police pick her up passed out against a wall and a medical exam reveals she is pregnant, she is charged with criminal endangerment of her fetus. Behind closed doors, the judge offers to let her off the hook if she "takes care of" her pregnancy, and Ruth becomes a test case in the making.
Ruth is in the holding tank pondering her limited options when a gaggle of Betty Crocker-haired pro-lifers file into the cell holding hands and singing hymns. Good Christian Gail Stoney (Mary Kay Place) bails Ruth out and brings her into the smarmily suburban Stoney family home, and the next thing Ruth knows she is at the center of a national battle between pro-life and pro-choice forces.
From here on in, director and co-writer Payne paints with the broadest strokes imaginable. The pro-lifers simper and chortle, drive wood-paneled station wagons, and lust in their hearts. The pro-choicers have short haircuts, drink tea, and worship the moon. There's nothing wrong with this kind of parody — think of Lily Tomlin and Alan Alda having a field day with aging-hippie stereotypes in last year's "Flirting With Disaster" — and Hollywood certainly has a well-established tradition of mocking Middle America.
The problem with parodying the abortion battle is that the joke is too close to the reality. This "war" — as Swoosie Kurtz's pro-choice zealot calls it — is already being fought with stereotypes. Many pro-lifers really do view pro-choicers as loonie lesbians, and abortion rights activists often do dismiss their opponents as self-righteous and sexually repressed.
"Citizen Ruth" takes such pains not to take sides that it doesn't have any fun. Each faction gets the same amount of screen time, yells at the same volume, is equally unpleasant. The national leaders who fly into town to great fanfare — Burt Reynolds for the pro-lifers, Tippie Hedren for the pro-choicers — are both blow-dried and unctuous. There's even a crazed Vietnam vet on each team. The whole thing is so primly even-handed it could have been put together by Ted Koppel.
In the midst of this dulling symmetry, Dern does her best to make Ruth a real, uneven person. Skinny and stringy-haired, she exudes an idle, open-mouthed greed that is almost appealing. Dern's Ruth is a big kid — throwing tantrums and looking surprised when she doesn't win the lottery. That's how she got in so much trouble to begin with, and it's also what makes her likeable. Dern's performance is so strong, in fact, that she throws the film off balance, coming across a little like Bob Hoskins in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" — a baffled human being lost in a cartoon landscape.
Eventually, Ruth figures out that all of her would-be saviors just want to use her to "send a message," and as she begins to think for herself, she foils their plans. It's hard not to think here of Norma McCorvey, the "Jane Roe" plaintiff in "Roe v. Wade" — another troubled woman with no money and a drug problem who inadvertently became a national symbol. In 1995, McCorvey, who had toured the country as an abortion-rights spokesperson, horrifed her sponsors when she switched sides and was baptized by the national head of Operation Rescue. Shortly thereafter, she appalled her new allies by saying she still believed in the right to a first-trimester abortion. McCorvey complained publicly that the pro-choicers had looked down on and tried to stifle her, but also made it clear that her new friends weren't going to be able to control her either.
Toward the end of "Citizen Ruth," Ruth quiets down and her loneliness comes to the surface. She begins to figure out — just as McCorvey did — that once she loses her political utility, she's nothing to anyone. In one poignant scene, Ruth slinks by a crowd of protesters from both sides and no one gives her a second glance. They're all there in her name, but none of them can see her. That's the problem with test-case politics: Individuals become icons, and their more complicated, contradictory selves disappear. It's also, unfortunately, the problem with "Citizen Ruth."
In Walter Kirns' 1992 novel "She Needed Me," a pro-lifer and an abortion-seeker meet — she's trying to get into a clinic, he's blocking the door — and wind up in a touchy, complicated relationship that changes both of them. "Citizen Ruth" plays with the same idea: that the abortion battle brings vastly different people who would otherwise remain strangers into intimate, nose-to-nose contact. But where Kirns uses the device to explore the common human longings that underlie the ironclad positions on both sides, Payne's characters share a roof yet never really meet.
"Citizen Ruth" is begging to be called "irreverent," but it's actually quite cautious. What's volatile about the real-life abortion struggle is the way the players are constantly colliding, wrestling, changing each other — whether in the courtroom or at the clinic door. That's also what's funny about it. With his scrupulous efforts to treat both sides as equal — and equally immutable — Payne misses this comic opportunity, and lets us leave with our preconceptions intact.
Movie Archive | Previous 5 reviews: "Evita" By Laura Miller (12/23/96) "Beavis and Butt-head Do America" By Gary Kamiya (12/23/96) "Ghosts of Mississippi" By Charles Taylor (12/23/96) "The People Vs. Larry Flynt" By Charles Taylor (12/23/96) "One Fine Day" By Stephanie Zacharek (12/16/96) |