CITIZEN RUTH (67)

Directed by: Alexander Payne

Starring: Laura Dern, Kurtwood Smith, Swoosie Kurtz

The Pitch: A venal, irresponsible, glue-sniffing - and very pregnant - junkie becomes a pawn in the battle between abortion activists and pro-life Christians.

Theo Sez: If courage and honesty were the sole criteria for success, the world would be a much better place and this would be one of the films of the year : it not only handles one of America's (if not quite the rest of the world's) hottest potatoes without ever reaching for the gloves, but also manages to skewer the extremists on both sides of the debate with equal venom (even though its individualistic sensibility clearly marks it as pro-choice, at least in spirit). Yet, oddly enough, its even-handedness is partly the problem - if only because, in reaching for parallels between the two camps (equating e.g. the pro-lifers' Christian hymns with the abortion activists crooning songs to their Moon Goddess), it tends to reduce the issues to a facile game of tit-for-tat : there's something deflationary about it - it flattens everything, boiling it down to a simple case of one's-as-bad-as-the- other. Like its heroine, who judges everything in purely venal terms (going with whoever's offering the most money), it sees the world as a sea of bullshit where only the cynical can swim - an attitude Chuck Tatum might be proud of, but not a particularly rich or stimulating view of life : the film feels incomplete, the way ACE IN THE HOLE might've felt had it ended after an hour, with the carnival in full swing. As a movie it's phenomenally (if deliberately) ugly-looking, all of it shot in the same grey light, but it has a very distinctive acrid flavour and some excellent jokes ; plus of course - within its rather reductive limits - tremendous courage and honesty...