Citizen Ruth
Inventing the Abbotts
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
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Contemporary pop culture reveals symptoms of this shame and panic everywhere: what else were the most recent Oscar awards about? I’m thinking not only of the impulse to reward movies that spoke up for social rejects, thereby deflecting attention from the Academy’s own rejections–a brand of Oscarthink that in 1955 deemed Marty the best picture of the year–but also of the ap-
To be fair, neither the “independent” Disney-distributed Citizen Ruth, which I loathe, nor the Twentieth Century-Fox release Inventing the Abbotts, which I like, could ever hope to be nominated for Oscars. But both are fundamentally about class panic, even though Citizen Ruth never owns up to it and Inventing the Abbotts can safely broach the matter only because the film is set in the late 50s and early 60s. In other respects these pictures are drastically different, the first an irreverent satire about pro- and antiabortion activists converging on a hapless, homeless doper who’s pregnant for the fifth time, and the second a coming-of-age story about a couple of working-class brothers and three upper-class sisters in a small town in Illinois.
The film’s amused contempt for Ruth’s white-trash surroundings, passed off as some sort of realism, is superseded by mockery (pitched as satire) of the couple’s blue-collar home and all that goes with it–including their charitable and compassionate impulses. Repeatedly the film associates grotesque class trappings with political convictions of every stripe. This is where Citizen Ruth decisively parts company with a humanistic comedy of class difference like Boudu Saved From Drowning; even Sullivan’s Travels, which mocks a millionaire’s political idealism, shows respect for poor and rich alike. But as this film moves up the economic ladder–first to the home of a middle-class lesbian pro-choice couple (Swoosie Kurtz and Kelly Preston) plastered with leftist and vegetarian slogans and filled with dresses from Guatemala, then to the hotel room (and boy masseur) of a wealthy pro-life minister (Burt Reynolds) and the helicopter of a wealthy pro-choice celebrity (Tippi Hedren)–its derision never varies. Less ridiculed is a Vietnam-vet biker with an artificial leg (M.C. Gainey) who improbably works security for the pro-choice contingent and, even more improbably, coughs up $15,000 he’s stashed away from an “Agent Orange settlement” to match the pro-lifers’ proffered bribe to the heroine.
Doug, the younger brother and narrator (recounting the story from the vantage point of someone much older), is shy and awkward with women, while Jacey is a ladies’ man. (Paradoxically, as we eventually discover, the sexual behavior of both brothers comes largely from their sense of class.) Jacey at 17 gets involved first with Eleanor (Jennifer Connelly), the youngest and most rebellious of the Abbott girls, while Doug at 15 forms an uneasy friendship with the similarly awkward Pamela (Liv Tyler), the middle daughter, who’s the same age he is.
