What’s so funny about abortion? That’s not the question to ask of Citizen Ruth, the first (and probably last) film satire to examine the passions surrounding the acrimonious struggle over abortion rights. It’s not really about abortion, but more the fanaticism and hypocrisy attending the protestations of both pro-life and pro-choice camps. The film strives for evenhandedness, and mostly succeeds on this count.
First-time filmmaker Alexander Payne is unwilling to take sides with either faction, preferring instead to survey the battlefield and pronounce a pox on everybody’s grouses. Payne, who coauthored the screenplay with Jim Taylor, is either very brave or very foolish to tread into the most contentious and emotionally eviscerating issue gripping the body politic. His film has been opening sporadically around the country and hasn’t found many viewers.
Actually, it’s hard to figure out who the audience for Citizen Ruth is. The most passionate activists likely will be offended at Payne’s potshots taken against their side, and the vast muddled middle are so sick of hearing about abortion that they aren’t going to spend good money to see a movie—let alone a comedy—about it.
Too bad, because this flawed but provocative film delivers loads of wicked satire, nimble comic acting, and uncomfortable truths. The title character, Ruth Stoops, is a skull-crackingly stupid wastrel who has abandoned four children, the kids being of less concern to her than feeding her glue-huffing habit. The film opens with Ruth, played by Laura Dern, who shows a surprising flair for comedy, pregnant again. She lands in jail for abusing inhalants, and when the judge discovers that she’s got another little welfare rug-rat in the oven, he threatens to put her away for criminal endangerment of her fetus—unless, absurdly, she agrees to an abortion.
“Oh God, help me!” Ruth moans, lying on the floor of her jail cell. It happens that four evangelical Christian women from a group called Baby-Savers have just been stored in the cell with Ruth following a protest. They hear her tale of woe, and next thing you know, Ruth and her unborn child have been bailed out and taken in by Baby-Saver leaders Norm and Gail Stoney (Kurtwood Smith and Mary Kay Place).
The Stoneys try to rehabilitate Ruth, but their motives appear less than pure. Norm senses that he’s got a prize catch on his hands, an indigent mother whom a judge tried to force into an abortion. He figures Ruth for a great convert to the pro-life cause, and most importantly, a propaganda coup he can exploit in the local media.
Unfortunately, Ruth isn’t playing along. Payne and Taylor’s wonderfully subversive heroine is too crass and stupid to fit into the oppressively cheerful Stoneys’ agenda. They dress her in a pastel sweatshirt with a teddy bear applique. The Stoneys talk about Jesus and how Ruth has been oppressed by pro-choicers, and think they’re winning her over. Ruth just wants to find their son’s model airplane glue.
Some of the mockery is nothing but a cheap shot. In his fumbling, Ward Cleaverish way, Norm comes on to Ruth, and it seems to be an instance of Payne piling it on. But the most pointed criticism concerns the Stoneys’ teenage daughter (Alicia Witt), who is a rock-and-roll rebel nursing a low-key disdain for her clueless parents, who are so involved with saving the outcast women of the world they fail to notice what’s happening under their own noses.
Eventually Ruth steals away with Diane and Rachel (Swoosie Kurtz and Kelly Preston), a pair of pinched, joyless lesbian feminists who fancy themselves the poor dingbat’s liberators. The director has done a piquant job of capturing and savoring the class differences between pro-choicers and pro-lifers. The working-class Stoneys sing hymns to Jesus and live in a modest house in the flight path of the local airport. Diane and Rachel, who sing hymns to the Great Goddess, are wealthier, better-educated, and live in a much nicer house in the country.
Though the lesbians think of themselves as a vast improvement on the impossibly backwards Stoneys, Payne makes it clear that Ruth, now outfitted in a Frida Kahlo T-shirt, has just fallen in with a better class of scoundrel. The hilariously severe lesbians, assisted inexplicably by members of a motorcycle gang, tell Ruth she’s safe now, and that they support her right to choose what to do with her body, meaning, she’d better choose to abort.
Once the pro-lifers learn where Ruth is staying, they besiege Fortress FemiNazi with bullhorns and offer Ruth cash to come out and have the baby. Our dim heroine, ever faithful to her own grubby bottom line, is willing to do the bidding of the highest bidder. The furious lesbians pony up cash of their own. Neither side wants to let Ruth escape, and both bring in the big guns from Washington to speak to the cameras. Tippi Hedren plays the impeccably coifed feminist honcho, and a spectacularly oily Burt Reynolds portrays the pro-life panjandrum.
Payne doesn’t know how to end the movie, and loses focus as Ruth’s crisis pregnancy reaches the moment of decision. He delivers a resolution that won’t satisfy anybody, though it’s hard to imagine any other ending that would have allowed him to preserve the film’s more or less noncommittal stance. I say more or less, because despite his acidic send up of both sides, Payne seems to be saying that whatever Ruth’s outrageous failings, the circumstances of her life are too deeply troubling for anyone but Ruth to decide her fate or that of her child.
The film’s great strength is its unwillingness to sentimentalize Ruth, a degraded hustler, and this short-circuits the response we’re used to having to characters like her. Yes, she’s a lout, but in a profanity-filled showdown with her mother, we learn that simpleton Ruth was, at a vulnerable time in her life, hideously victimized by men who warped her permanently. While Ruth has certainly been a victim of male brutality, she has refused to take responsibility for the rest of her life. Neither her drug habit nor her neglected children can be rationalized away.
If Payne is saying that neither the pro-life zealots nor their pro-choice counterparts fully allow for Ruth’s humanity, he’s also asserting that the circumstances of Ruth’s sad life are such that only she can know what’s best for her. And inasmuch as Citizen Ruth fails to acknowledge that there is another life involved in the decision to abort, it ultimately forwards a pro-choice position.
As regrettable as that is, there is much to be learned from this pitch-black comedy. Citizen Ruth observes that when people commit themselves with single-minded devotion to a cause, no matter how righteous, they risk losing something of their own humanity. In the eyes of the zealot, the adversary becomes a demon and people become pawns. What is more, the zealot, while often doing good and necessary work, can let slip away that which makes him whole.
Although it may not be the right question, it is still hard to avoid: What’s so funny about abortion? No matter how much one might chuckle at the film’s insights into the often ludicrous nature of self-righteousness, the fact remains that abortion kills babies. Even though only the most humorless partisan would refuse to chuckle at the caricatures of pro-choicers and their pro-life protagonists, it is hard to let loose with a belly laugh at the satire. Pro-lifers know that however nutty the Stoneys and their ilk behave, they at least understand that innocent lives are at stake in this showdown. And I suppose that the pro-abortion rights crowd, for their own reasons, would have similarly uncomfortable feelings.
Still, one can see Citizen Ruth and not be in danger of losing one’s principles. The film doesn’t challenge them. Nonetheless, for Christians, who are admonished by Scripture to beware self-righteousness and to love their enemies, this is useful stuff.