LY #98 Alexander Payne's Comedy of Fanaticism

Laura Dern (foreground) in Citizen Ruth

As a rhetorician I tend to see all texts, no matter how artistic or entertaining, as persuasive.  But some texts are made to be rhetorical.  This weekend we watched Citizen Ruth (1997), a dark and funny satire on the abortion debate.  I didn't think I'd like it because I find the national debate so debilitating and off-putting.  Nevertheless, I was caught from moment we see our "heroine" being dragged off to jail for huffing patio sealant by cops who know her name. 

I wouldn't have ordered this from Netflix but my spouse wants to see all the movies directed by fellow Nebraskan Alexander Payne, whose Nebraska is currently nominated for six Oscars.  When I read the description I was still hesitant.  But the movie was quite powerful as it presented its sharp and yet still strangely respectful portraits of the fanatics on both sides of the national debate.  Even though the quirky wrong-headedness of most of the characters is fully revealed, none of them are presented as hateful.  Each character has his or her reasons for their way of being in the world.  There isn't the sense here, as there is in some of the Coen Bros movies, that middle-Americans are lesser beings than filmmakers.

A spacey Laura Dern is the huffing addict Ruth.  She has already had four kids that have been taken from her and she has been declared an unfit parent.  At the movie's start, she is facing a felony charge for getting pregnant again.  The judge encourages her to "have it taken care of."  As she lies in a fetal position in the jail cell she prays to God to help her.  At that moment a group of singing Pro-Life demonstrators is brought in for violating distance rules at the local clinic.  Ruth is taken up by this group, called Baby Savers.   A married couple, Norm and Gail Stoney (Kurtwood Smith and Mary Kay Place), members of the group, bring her into their house and say they will take care of her until she has the baby.  While this couple is a stereotype of what the left thinks of Good Christian People, they are also struggling folks with whom we can identify.  Gail struggles with a loudmouthed teenage daughter who sneaks out of the house and Norm is a put-upon employee of a Wal-Mart type store.  When the sound tracks picks up the tunes of hymns sung by the Christians, it doesn't do so in a condescending manner.

Nor is it condescending when the other side sings songs to the moon.  Oh, yes, there are Pro-Choice people who are presented just as satirically as the other side.  One of the Baby Savers turns out to be a Pro-Choice spy (Swoozie Kurtz) who whisks Ruth away from the Stoneys to the wilderness retreat she shares with her lesbian lover (Kelly Preston).  Like the true believers on the other side, who sing to Jesus, these women sing to nature.  And also, like the Baby Savers, they want to use Ruth to send a message.

Ruth isn't interested in either side using her as a rhetorical trope.  She bolts from each side when they try and constrain her, but then is brought back  by money.  A bidding war for her "choice" begins. At the top of the Pro-Choice side is the carefully coiffed Jessica Weiss, played by Tippi Hedren looking as cool and collected as she did in Hitchcock's Marnie.   In other words, she looks like she could be covering up a whole lot of crazy.  At the top of the Pro-Life heap is Blaine Gibbons, played by Burt Reynolds an unctuous and scarey Elmer Gantry type with a boy-toy on the side and a horrible hairpiece on top.  Payne presents both the Pro-Choice and the Pro-Life extremists as believing more in their cause than in the living person(s) they're dealing with. 

Payne, in his role as Author and Deus-Ex-Machina, gives Ruth an out by supplying a miscarriage that she doesn't tell anyone about.  I think that this plot device also keeps us focused more on the "dialogue" between the sides than on the actual choice that Ruth will need to make.  I don't think Payne and his co-author Jim Taylor wanted our focus to be on the actual life of the foetus or child.  They wanted us to think about the ethics of using other human beings as symbols for a cause.