Ruth em Questão

Ruth Stoops (Laura Dern) is paint-huffing homeless white trash. She has four kids but doesn't have custody of any of them. She goes to her brother to ask for money and he offers $15. She passes out in public and gets arrested. She's pregnant again. The angry judge overcharges her and she's pressured to get an abortion. In jail, she is befriended by Diane Siegler (Swoosie Kurtz) and her team of religious pro-life protesters. Norm (Kurtwood Smith) and Gail Stoney (Mary Kay Place) bail them out and take Ruth into their home. The Stoneys have two kids, rebellious Cheryl (Alicia Witt) and Matt. They take Ruth to a fake clinic to talk her out of the abortion and make her a media case for their group "The Baby Savers". Ruth struggles with her addition and her aversion for notoriety. Diane is actually a pro-choice spy and helps her get away from the Stoneys. Diane calls in Harlan (M.C. Gainey), her lesbian partner Rachel (Kelly Preston), and other pro-choice activists. Her abortion becomes a national issue, and the two sides bring their national leaders Jessica Weiss (Tippi Hedren) and Blaine Gibbons (Burt Reynolds).

Alexander Payne tackles this divisive issue with humor. It skewers both side although the pro-lifers get the greater ridicule. The tricky subject matter is tough to get right and the humor is hard to calibrate. I don't think this is funny for everybody. Laura Dern delivers a complicated and endearing character. The level of difficulty is very high and Payne navigates it with great skills.

Alexander Payne, from personal opinion, is a very talented director and writer. With the exception of his recent film 'Downsizing' (his most ambitious film with such a great concept but underwhelming in execution), all his films range from very good to outstanding, especially 'Sideways'.

'Citizen Ruth' was his first full-length film, and while not his best or one of them (perhaps his second or third weakest, 'The Descendants' while still very good is also a lesser effort) there is a lot to admire. 'Citizen Ruth' may lack the viciousness and poignancy of his later and particularly best work, when Payne had properly found his feet and fine-tuned his style, hence why it is not rated as highly as much as them, but his talent for directing and writing for so early on is very much evident.

The film is notable for handling a very difficult subject matter (abortion), but uniquely not taking sides and shows both sides of the argument rather than making a judgement on whether it's good or bad. This was a very brave and daring decision and attitude to take, and one that those who have been through it themselves in particular will appreciate and relate with, there is nothing to be offended by.

Even with this difficult and sensitive subject, 'Citizen Ruth' manages to be entertaining in a darkly amusing way but doing it tastefully and taking it seriously still. In typical Payne style, it is also very thought-provoking and honest with plenty to say and saying it with tact.

Payne directs with skill, even if his direction became more refined later. 'Citizen Ruth' is very nicely filmed, if not one of his most visually beautiful or striking films ('Sideways', 'The Descendants' and especially 'Nebraska' fit this distinction more). The story is compelling and balanced, if not always sharp in pacing in the latter stages.

Similarly, Payne gets the best out of his actors. The whole cast are top notch, but this is sensational Laura Dern's, in one of her best and boldest performances, film.

Overall, hugely impressive and brave. 8/10 Bethany Cox

I was pleasantly surprised by this film. What I thought was going to be a Laura Dern chick flick turned into a really exciting, character driven political commentary in the league of BOYS DON'T CRY. However, where BOYS is extremely dramatic and intense, RUTH is comic and satirical. No matter which side of the abortion debate you find yourself on, you'll recognize this rogues gallery of overly self-righteous fools and freaks that crowd our existence as well as Ruth's. Where another reviewer here finds the story predictable, I don't see how anyone could guess the end of this feature. Not that it's some clever, ingenious twist like the end of the SIXTH SENSE. It's merely not the way most movies end, and although slightly a fluffy ending, it's definitely unpredictable. If you enjoyed BOYS, see RUTH as part of a weekend double feature.

I thought "Citizen Ruth" was fine, biting satire and a movie that had to be made at some point in America's history. Like all good movies, it is not really about the subject at hand - in this case, the abortion issue - but about something deeper and more far reaching. "Citizen Ruth" is about people who get so devoted to a cause they think important to humanity that they forget to consider actual human beings.

Of course, the unavoidable problem with a movie such as this is that almost all of the characters are unsympathetic. Regardless of what opinion one has on the abortion issue, both factions behave badly and they do it supposedly on behalf of the most irresponsible, irredeemable, unlikable (but still watchable) glue sniffer around, Ruth. The effect can be a little wearing, especially at the end.

The movie alleviates this problem by including one wonderful character, Harlan, the cynical Gulf War vet. He unceremoniously plunks his prosthetic leg on the kitchen table. He eats shirtless standing over a sink. He sees Ruth as a person, albeit a diminished one, and is willing to give her what she really wants (money) in order to, as he says, level the playing field, even though he knows she will squander it in a matter of days and tells her so. While he is on the prochoice side, he sees the humor in the situation, as evidenced by his wonderful grin and does not seem to lose track of his own humanity. His dialogue is priceless. Where everybody else speaks in rhetoric he cuts to the chase. My favorite retort of his occurs when the sanctimonious Dale, a pro-lifer, spouts out some Biblical condemnation at him and he responds by giving the exact location in the Bible of the quote. Naturally the actor playing the part, M. C. Gainey, deserves much of the credit for creating this appealing character.

The movie has many other merits but Harlan is my own personal favorite

Unlike every other young American filmmaker, buzzing like moths around the asthmatic short guy from Little Italy, Alexander Payne has a pleasingly atypical role model: Luis Bunuel. His brilliant ELECTION sets down a number of Bunuel tropes in the chain restaurants and badly lit high schools of Omaha, Nebraska, and his first feature, CITIZEN RUTH, is even closer to the wall-eyed master's bone.

The heroine, played by Laura Dern, is named Ruth Stoops, and that's an understatement. Ruth begins the picture as a dumpster-diving skank whose preoccupations are birthing bastards and huffing glue. Through a BEING THERE-ish chain of circumstances, Ruth finds herself in the hands of a family of Baby Savers (Payne's version of Operation Rescue), and then a squadron of mostly lesbian, bourgeois, goddess-worshiping, Frida-Kahlo-T-shirt-wearing pro-choice activists. Though the movie cannily found a home with the Sundance crowd as a "satire" of both sides of the "abortion debate," the topicality is strictly surface. CITIZEN RUTH is a straight-up-Bunuelian demonstration of the hundred facets of human mendacity and venality, cloaking their shivering skins in the warm fabric of Morals. It's a cheerfully made thesis movie about the universality of hypocrisy.

Payne has a curious, sure, light, on-the-money touch. Every detail you notice--from a Baby Saver mom's Tupperware samovar of cherry Kool-Ade, to Kurtwood Smith's Sav-On uniform (with a button that sadly screams "Ask Me!")--is ever so slightly exaggerated and perfectly true. Payne's rendering of his home town Omaha, its wan, angry Christians, and the kinda-gay, kinda-liberal-artsy interlopers, makes the Coen Brothers look both pizzazzier and much nastier. The single-mindedness of the movie is oddly pleasing when it's mated with such a certain, gingerly approach. (Payne's tastes run gratifyingly wide: his jokes, and his music, seem derived from the works of James L. Brooks.) There's a two-dimensionality about CITIZEN RUTH that makes it less deeply satisfying than ELECTION, but this is one smart filmmaker. As the millennium rolls in, the likes of Wes Anderson and Kevin Smith will be gagging on his dust.