Citizen Ruth: 1996, dir. Alexander Payne. Seen on DVD (Feb. 22).
Blanket announcement here: Every time I write one of these entries about a specific movie, with the movie/year as the title, it’s likely to include detailed plot information. If you feel this might spoil your enjoyment of the movie, don’t read it. The “spoiler” info won’t appear on the site index page, but I reserve the right to mention exactly what happens in the damn movie. I am tired of putting those little “spoilers to follow” tags all over the entries, so there.
Citizen Ruth is not a movie I can say I liked, really. I can say it was a good movie, and that I’m glad I saw it, but it wasn’t particularly enjoyable. It was disturbing and sometimes difficult to watch.
It occurs to me that this is one entry where I might have to shut off the comments feature after a few days before people hit it on a Google search, if you know what I mean and I think you do. So I think I had better not talk very much about abortion except as it relates to the movie itself.
I will say that this movie gave me flashbacks not only to Catholic high school/church lectures and videos and so forth, but also to the year I had an internship as a Capitol Bureau reporter in Louisiana, from 1990-91. The La. legislative session of 1990 is notorious as the year the legislators took an anti-flag-burning bill and turned it into a bill banning abortions. One legislator continually waved around a tiny plastic fetus very similar to the one that the doctor hands Ruth in this movie. (Ted Koppel: “Mr. Jenkins, please put down the doll and answer the question.”) I feel like I should say that both sides got nasty but that is in fact untrue: the abortion-rights activists all wore conservative suits and makeup and spoke logically in reasonable tones of voice. Obviously this was a planned strategy, although it didn’t work in Louisiana.
So I’m watching scenes with the anti-abortion activists in Citizen Ruth that might seem over-the-top to some viewers, but which I realize are eerily accurate, and that made the movie even harder to watch.
Citizen Ruth is supposed to show that anyone who treats a person like an agenda instead of a human is reprehensible, whether they are styling themselves as pro-choice or pro-life. The abortion-rights activists in the movie want Ruth to have her abortion because It Makes A Statement, not because they truly think this will improve her quality of life, not that they even care about her quality of life very much.
This movie succeeds because the main character is appalling, and in fact downright disgusting, but we still empathize with her. She considers having her baby instead of aborting it only because the anti-abortion activists are offering her huge sums of money … and no matter which way she is leaning at any given point, she still drinks like crazy and tries to find something to inhale (model airplane glue, cleaning products, you name it). You can practically smell her and you know it isn’t a pleasant smell, either. You wouldn’t want her anywhere near your own life, you wouldn’t want to have to deal with her at all, but you don’t like the way everyone is treating her, either. She may be reprehensible but everyone else in the movie is a whole lot worse. Laura Dern is quite believable in the role.
However, the movie does obviously lean toward the abortion-rights activists, who come off as much more reasonable, more intelligent, and far cuter than the anti-abortion folks. The abortion-rights women are all adorable moon-goddess-worshipping lesbians, sometimes silly and always too devoted to their causes to act truly compassionate to Ruth … but the anti-abortion women have dreadful hairdos and tacky clothes (and equally lack compassion). So the movie does have a certain bias, at least visually.
I was very much in suspense about how the movie would end. I couldn’t imagine the filmmakers would end with her having the baby, because of all the alcohol/drugs she consumed … and for the sake of balance, I thought they would have to find a third option, like a miscarriage. I was right and it was handled very deftly. I was pleased with the end of the movie, although I had wondered if she would run off with Harlan, the nice biker dude. Nah. Too Hollywood, I guess.
This movie was produced by Miramax, which Disney owns. A little surprising, although Miramax-under-Disney has in fact produced some pretty controversial and rough films, and the only one that caused any major difficulties was Dogma. Perhaps it is because both sides of the abortion issue were portrayed as scheming and corrupt, to some extent. Perhaps because it was a small movie with an arthouse distribution, and it didn’t get enough press to be a major issue? I don’t know.