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Citizen Ruth (1996) – Movie Review
By Robert L. Jones | December 20, 1996
"Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue": Laura Dern is a white-trash heroin(e) in Alexander Payne's farce, "Citizen Ruth"
Ruthlessly On-Target
[xrr rating=4/5]
Citizen Ruth. Starring Laura Dern, Swoosie Kurtz, Kurtwood Smith, Mary Kay Place, Kelly Preston, and M.C. Gainey. Screenplay by Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor. Directed by Alexander Payne. (Miramax Films/Independent Pictures, 1996, Color, 102 minutes. MPAA Rating: R.)
One of the most oft-repeated clichés of the pro-choice movement is the line “men shouldn’t have any say over abortion, or a woman’s body.” Well, director Alexander Payne and his co-scenarist Jim Taylor have a lot to say about abortion, women’s bodies, and the issues of individualism versus groupthink in this frank and offbeat comedy.
I love Laura Dern in this movie! She is genuinely funny and quirky as the slow-witted Ruth Stoops, a white-trash glue sniffer who finds herself at storm center as a judge (David Graf) convicts her of criminal negligence to her unborn fetus. However, out of court, he advises her to “take care of this problem,” sotto voce implying that she get an abortion. Ruth doesn’t really care, though. She just wants to find some Krylon or airplane glue to inhale.
Finding herself in jail, some Christian pro-lifers take her under their wing. Suddenly, she is no longer a rational actor whose free will determines the birth of her baby, but a pawn in a public relations war between pro-life and pro-choice zealots. It is as if Ruth doesn’t even exist as an individual, and is only important to these fanatics as a poster child for their respective causes.
What I most love about the characterizations of the activists is how Payne shows how removed they are from reality. The pro-life couple who take Ruth into their home (Mary Kay Place and Kurtwood Smith) are Christian evangelicals who won’t even have a television in their home, who hold independent church services at their house and sing horrifyingly bad hymns like “Jesus Loves the Little Children” (this hokum is probably the main reason people become atheists; whatever happened to the grandeur of church hymns by J.S. Bach or Cesar Franck?) Their clothing is right out of the Monkey Wards 1977 catalogue, and they speak in that anti-intellectual singsong style.
The pro-choicers are just as big a scream. Swoosie Kurtz plays a “double agent” who spends months undercover as a tacky Christian hick pro-life protestor, in order to kidnap Ruth, whose pregnancy the pro-lifers intend to bring to term. Once she has Ruth at her house, the wig comes off and she becomes her real self, a somewhat butch lesbian with a bookish feminist lesbian lover (Kelly Preston). I love the scene when they sing a moon hymn to Gaia, embracing Ruth with just a little too much bodily affection. Ruth realizes that her new captors are just as much nutburgers as her old ones.
Eventually, the question of whether Ruth will or won’t have her baby boils over into a national media circus, and we get a couple of campy cameos from Burt Reynolds as President of the Baby Savers and my own Hitchcock goddess, Tippi Hedren, as the head of Pro-Choice. Though her captors claim they’re keeping Ruth locked up in their country house for her own protection, she slowly becomes wise to them when one of them lets it slip that their using her “to send a message that a woman’s choice can’t be bought.”
“You want to send a message?!?” Dern fires back. “I ain’t no fucking telegram, bitch!”
Of course, Payne and Taylor’s message is the true “pro-choice” one, that the rights of individuals are what count in these controversies. They demonstrate how the knee-jerk groupthink of movement activists often works to deprive others of their liberties when their exercise gets in the way of a movement’s agenda. It pitilessly depicts zealots from both sides of the fence on the abortion issue as cut from the same bolt of drab cloth, as insignificant people whose lives would be empty without having a cause to blindly follow.
Citizen Ruth shows the ultimate disdain such groups have when the hoi polloi actually exercise their rational, individual choice, and common sense. Payne’s moral center of the movie is a Vietnam biker vet (M.C. Gainey) who—though a fervent pro-choicer— sees through the fanaticism of both sides and treats Ruth as an individual, and gives her the “tough love” she needs, rather than patronizing her.
Another nice touch I like about this movie is that Payne presents us with sincere activists, who make pretty good points for both sides. And that’s where most Americans are; they’re not absolutely pro-life, nor absolutely pro-choice. But, reaching those points-of-view would require thinking, of which most rabid True Believers are incapable.
Citizen Ruth is director Alexander Payne’s first feature film, but he directs it with a self-assured style, in which the laughs come easy. This acerbic and cynical comedy easily belongs in the company of Preston Sturges or Billy Wilder, and I’m already looking forward to his next offering.
Robert L. Jones is a photojournalist living and working in Minnesota. His work has appeared in Black & White Magazine, Entrepreneur, Hoy! New York, the New York Post, RCA Victor (Japan), Scene in San Antonio, Spirit Magazine (Canada), Top Producer, and the Trenton Times. Mr. Jones is a past entertainment editor of The New Individualist.
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