Citizen Ruth

Citizen Ruth (1996) is a satirical comedy from Alexander Payne that you can watch online on iFILM. It is the debut feature of the director who would later make Election and Sideways, and he opens his career by jabbing straight at the rawest nerve in American politics.

Laura Dern plays Ruth Stoops, a glue-sniffing drifter nobody bothered to notice until she turned up pregnant for the fifth time. A judge drops a hint: terminate the pregnancy and the charges go away. Suddenly both sides want a piece of her. Anti-abortion crusaders take her into their home and call her a saved soul; pro-choice organizers pull her the other way. All Ruth really wants is for everyone to leave her alone and maybe hand over some cash. Around her, a media circus keeps swelling.

Payne refuses to pick a team. He skewers both of them at once, mocking the slogans and the way a real, messy person gets flattened into a banner for someone else's fight. Swoosie Kurtz, Tippi Hedren and Burt Reynolds fill out the cast, while Dern carries the whole thing, swerving between farce and pity. A pitch-black comedy that has only grown sharper with the years. Stream Citizen Ruth (1996) online on iFILM.