SATIRE AIN'T FAIR.

`Citizen Ruth'

Citizen Ruth, released last month on video and laser disk, does what any genuine satire must do: It offends our sensibilities for the sake of morality. Its creators, Alexander Payne (writer-director) and Jim Taylor (cowriter) aren't deterred by political correctness or good taste or even a sense of fair play. 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); in other words, a phony. But satire has an obligation only to be moral, not political. The evil indicted by this movie is neither baby killing nor the curtailment of women's rights. Instead, Payne and Taylor are indicting blindness: the moral and psychological blindness that comes to those who, hating in the cause of compassion or justice, become besotted by loathing of their adversaries.

Under the opening credits we hear the Frank Sinatra standard, "All the Way." When somebody loves you, it's no good unless they love you ... all the way. But who could so radically love Ruth Stoops? 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. 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. Bedraggled, self-pitying, utterly selfish, and semilobotomized by drugs, Ruth is the apotheosis of White Trash. Love Ruth Stoops? All the way? C'mon.

Well, maybe the Stoneys can. They're members of the Baby-Savers, a prolife group. They're willing to take Ruth into their home, feed and clothe her, and provide her with all obstetrical aid. Yes, they're willing to love Ruth Stoops ... as long as she serves their cause by embarrassing the judge (a longtime foe of theirs) who urged her to have an abortion.

Or perhaps Rachel and Diane, prochoicers who "rescue" Ruth from the Baby-Savers, can love our heroine? Certainly, they give her all the comforts of their country house, feed her macrobiotically, replace the cornball maternity T-Shirt the Stoneys gave her with a Frida Kahlo silkscreened blouse, and teach her to chant to "our mother, the moon"; but they too have an agenda. Since Ruth's case has caught the attention of national media, she must, must send a strong message out there on the airways that a woman's choice can't be bought. And, of course, there's really only one choice that affirms free choice, right?

What both groups have in common is their blindness, perhaps even fundamental indifference, toward the needy, amoral, untamable, and rebarbative piece of humanity that Ruth is. All are so caught up with what she represents that they can't truly know her, much less love her.

For instance, when their guest regales them with one of the many horror stories 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. But the sexual rage in Ruth can't be shushed or lulled by hymns or healed by outdoor cookouts. The Stoneys are like surgeons trying to close gunshot wounds with scotch tape.

But the prochoicers outside the Stoneys' dining-room window shouting out warnings about brainwashing seem just as purblind. What their eyes encounter is a girl picking at her food, but they scream and carry on as if they were witnessing a torture session. Are they crazy? wonders Ruth. Yes, they are, affirms Mr. Stoney, as he routs the prochoicers with a shotgun, all the while looking pretty crazy himself.

This blindness toward Ruth is an extension of the myopia her supporters have vis-a-vis their own lives. The Stoneys can't see that their own daughter is sneaking out of the house at night for booze and boyfriends, and Mr. Stoney can't perceive that Blaine Gibbons, the great media honcho of prolifers, is a pederast with a thirteen-year-old catamite in his entourage. And in the other camp the goddess-worshiping, granola lesbians, Diane and Rachel, don't permit themselves to know that the semipsychotic Viet vet they use as a bodyguard is pounding prolifers into pulp right in their farmhouse cellar.

Yes, this movie is unfair. Virtually no high-minded feminists employ thugs, and I presume that scarcely any fundamentalist superstars are pederasts. But satire isn't fair; it is purposefully unfair. It uses exaggeration to get at the least palatable truths. At their very worst, prolifers are so possessed by the ecstasy of accusation that they do indeed wink at the evils in their movement. (Think of those prolife spokesmen who have refused to condemn the murders of abortionists.) At their very worst, prochoicers, though wielding words instead of chains, can be as brutally exclusionary as any lethal motorcycle gang. (Why do so few women who oppose abortion feel comfortable calling themselves feminists, though they may agree with the movement's other ideas?)

Aesthetically, satirists tend to be classicists drawn to neat parallels in their storytelling. Thus, in Citizen Ruth both sides use thuggish Viet vets. If the Stoneys chant Protestant hymns at Ruth's bedside, Diane and Rachel chant on their porch while their intended protegee looks on like a bemused pet dog. If Burt Reynolds as the celebrity prolifer leads his troops in an automotive convoy, Tippi Hedren as a celebrity prochoicer descends on the battlefield in a helicopter--a veritable dea ex machina. And so forth. These symmetries don't take on a ticktock predictability but are woven into the fast-paced comic action.

The staging, too, is classical in its dry wit and avoidance of vulgar emphases. When Mr. Stoney holds a press conference, the dead-pan silence of skeptical 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. As Mr. Stoney says grace at the family barbecue, his voice is drowned out by jet planes, the barking of dogs, the motors of lawnmowers. The abundance of American suburbia is overwhelming this poor man even as he tries to thank God for it.

Laura Dern's performance as Ruth is an adroit balancing act that keeps repulsiveness and pathos in perfect equipoise. Swoosie Kurtz as Diane and Kurtwood Smith as Stoney inject these fanatics with just enough humanity to keep us from dismissing them as monsters. (This dismissibility was the fatal flaw of To Die For.) The whole cast is commendable except for Burt Reynolds, who substitutes one-dimensional thuggishness for the oleaginous grandiosity that Blaine Gibbons should project (and that Charlton Heston would have radiated effortlessly).

The very wit and urbane puckishness 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 exhibits. Though the film skewers fanaticism and self-deception on both sides of the struggle, Payne and Taylor seem to add a few grains of gunpowder in undermining the prolife camp. I think this reflects a cultural bias rather than a moral tilt. The poor Stoneys, with their plastic "praying hands" aglow in the guest room, their cholesterol-rich barbecues, their graceless way of dressing (clip-on ties, "cute" maternity T-shirts), and even more graceless way with the English language, may not be fundamentally more ridiculous than the neopagan feminists chanting to the moon, but they are more unsightly. The camera 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 audience. The greater part of this film's satire is right on target, but when it lampoons the Stoneys for how they live as well as for what they do, a note of snobbery is sounded. 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. And it was the Yahoos who elicited Swift's most visceral contempt and the withdrawal of Gulliver from the human race.

But, let's say it again, satirists aren't fair.