Citizen Ruth Can the abortion conflict be entertainingly satirized? From gun-toting, born-again prolifers to lesbian pro-chokers, Citizen Ruth is a surprisingly effective spoof
Alleva, Richard
'Citizen Ruth' Richard Alleva SATIRE AIN'T FAIR Citizen Ruth, released last month on video and laser disk, does what any gen-uine satire must do: It of-fends our sensibilities for the sake of...
...Instead, Payne and Taylor are indicting blind-ness: the moral and psychological blind-ness that comes to those who, hating in the cause of compassion or justice, be-come besotted by loathing of their ad-versaries...
...The Stoneys are like surgeons trying to close gunshot wounds with scotch tape...
...Since Citizen Ruth-ostensibly a story about the abortion controversy- doesn't take a prolife or prochoice stand, it has been contemptuously labeled as the "prototypical apolitical film" {Film Comment...
...What their eyes encounter is a girl picking at her food, but they scream and carry on as if they were wit-nessing a torture session...
...This dismissibility was the fatal flaw of To Die For...
...Think of those prolife spokesmen who have re-fused to condemn the murders of abor-tionists...
...But who could so radically love Ruth Stoops...
...Well, maybe the Stoneys can...
...The very wit and urbane puckish-ness that writers Payne and Taylor bring to this movie and that make it so good also, at times, lead the filmmakers into the only sort of favoritism this film ex-hibits...
...A prosecutor is ready to indict her for reckless endangerment of her fetus but a judge is willing to dismiss the charge if she gets an abortion...
...Certainly, they give her all the comforts of their country house, feed her macro-biotically, replace the cornball materni-ty T-Shirt the Stoneys gave her with a Frida Kahlo silkscreened blouse, and teach her to chant to "our mother, the moon...
...And, of course, there's really only one choice that affirms free choice, right...
...But the prochoicers outside the Ston-eys' dining-room window shouting out warnings about brainwashing seem just as purblind...
...The cam-era is kinder to sleek pagans than to dowdy fundamentalists, or so it must seem to the college-educated people who constitute most of Citizen Ruth's au-dience...
...Stoney can't perceive that Blaine Gibbons, the great media honcho of prolifers, is a pederast with a thirteen-year-old mite in his entourage...
...Bedraggled, self-pitying, utterly selfish, and semiloboto-mized by drugs, Ruth is the apotheosis of White Trash...
...If the Stoneys chant Protestant hymns at Ruth's bed-side, Diane and Rachel chant on their porch while their intended protegee looks on like a bemused pet dog...
...When Mr...
...as long as she serves their cause by em-barrassing the judge (a longtime foe of theirs) who urged her to have an abor-tion...
...For instance, when their guest regales them with one of the many horror sto-ries from her squalid sex life, an anecdote of orgy culminating in self-mutilation, the Stoneys think it enough to shush Ruth politely so that her words don't reach the ears of their fascinated eight-year-old son...
...The poor Stoneys, with their plastic "praying hands" aglow in the guest room, their cholesterol-rich bar-becues, their graceless way of dressing (clip-on ties, "cute" maternity T-shirts), and even more graceless way with the English language, may not be funda-mentally more ridiculous than the neo-pagan feminists chanting to the moon, but they are more unsightly...
...But the sexual rage in Ruth can't be shushed or lulled by hymns or healed by outdoor cookouts...
...At their very worst, pro-lifers are so possessed by the ecstasy of accusation that they do indeed wink at the evils in their movement...
...And so forth...
...in other words, a phony...
...Love Ruth Stoops...
...And in the other camp the goddess-worshiping, granola lesbians, Diane and Rachel, don't permit themselves to know that the semipsy-chotic Viet vet they use as a bodyguard is pounding prolifers into pulp right in their farmhouse cellar...
...The abundance of American suburbia is overwhelming this poor man even as he tries to thank God for it...
...They're members of the Baby-Savers, a prolife group...
...Virtually no high-minded feminists employ thugs, and I presume that scarcely any funda-mentalist superstars are pederasts...
...it is purposefully unfair...
...Citizen Ruth' Richard Alleva SATIRE AIN'T FAIR Citizen Ruth, released last month on video and laser disk, does what any gen-uine satire must do: It of-fends our sensibilities for the sake of morality...
...The whole cast is com-mendable except for Burt Reynolds, who substitutes one-dimensional thug-gishness for the oleaginous grandiosity that Blaine Gibbons should project (and that Charlton Heston would have radi-ated effortlessly...
...Why do so few women who oppose abortion feel comfortable calling themselves fem-inists, though they may agree with the movement's other ideas...
...Yes, they are, affirms Mr...
...These symmetries don't take on a tick-tock predictability but are woven into the fast-paced comic action...
...Pregnant with her third unwanted baby, she swills down beer and whiskey, rents her body to no-accounts, and gets high on aerosol sprayed into plastic bags...
...Though the film skewers fanati-cism and self-deception on both sides of the struggle, Payne and Taylor seem to add a few grains of gunpowder in un-dermining the prolife camp...
...The evil indicted by this movie is neither baby killing nor the cur-tailment of women's rights...
...Swoosie Kurtz as Diane and Kurtwood Smith as Stoney inject these fanatics with just enough humanity to keep us from dismissing them as mon-sters...
...This blindness toward Ruth is an ex-tension of the myopia her supporters have vis-a-vis their own lives...
...If Burt Reynolds as the celebrity prolifer leads his troops in an automotive convoy, Tip-pi Hedren as a celebrity prochoicer de-scends on the battlefield in a helicopter-a veritable dea ex machina...
...wonders Ruth...
...All the way...
...Stoney, as he routs the prochoicers with a shotgun, all the while looking pretty crazy himself...
...If the feminists are the Laputans of this movie-like Swift's scholars, they are ridiculously high-minded and self-regarding-the Stoneys and their cohorts are Citizen Ruth's Yahoos...
...The greater part of this film's satire is right on target, but when it lam-poons the Stoneys for how they live as well as for what they do, a note of snob-bery is sounded...
...Stoney says grace at the family barbecue, his voice is drowned out by jet planes, the bark-ing of dogs, the motors of lawnmowers...
...Since Ruth's case has caught the atten-tion of national media, she must, must send a strong message out there on the airways that a woman's choice can't be bought...
...Stoney holds a press con-ference, the dead-pan silence of skepti-cal reporters is subtly amplified by the quiet swish-swish-swish of a manual vacuum cleaner operated by a maid in the back of the room...
...Aesthetically, satirists tend to be clas-sicists drawn to neat parallels in their sto-rytelling...
...When somebody loves you, it's no good unless they love you...all the way...
...Thus, in Citizen Ruth both sides use thuggish Viet vets...
...Are they crazy...
...C'mon...
...But, let's say it again, satirists aren't fair...
...The Stoneys can't see that their own daughter is sneaking out of the house at night for booze and boyfriends, and Mr...
...I think this reflects a cultural bias rather than a moral tilt...
...At their very worst, prochoicers, though wielding words instead of chains, can be as brutally exclusionary as any lethal motorcycle gang...
...All are so caught up with what she represents that they can't truly know her, much less love her...
...The staging, too, is classical in its dry wit and avoidance of vulgar emphases...
...Laura Dem's performance as Ruth is an adroit balancing act that keeps re-pulsiveness and pathos in perfect equi-poise...
...Yes, this movie is unfair...
...And it was the Yahoos who elicited Swift's most visceral contempt and the withdrawal of Gulliver from the human race...
...but they too have an agenda...
...It uses exaggeration to get at the least palatable truths...
...As Mr...
...Its creators, Alexander Payne (writer-director) and Jim Taylor (co-writer) aren't deterred by political cor-rectness or good taste or even a sense of fair play...
...Or perhaps Rachel and Diane, pro-choicers who "rescue" Ruth from the Baby-Savers, can love our heroine...
...What both groups have in common is their blindness, perhaps even funda-mental indifference, toward the needy, amoral, untamable, and rebarbative piece of humanity that Ruth is...
...But satire isn't fair...
...They're willing to take Ruth into their home, feed and clothe her, and pro-vide her with all obstetrical aid...
...Yes, they're willing to love Ruth Stoops...
...Under the opening credits we hear the Frank Sinatra standard, "All the Way...
...But satire has an obligation only to be moral, not political...
Vol. 124 • July 1997 • No. 13
