BEFORE: If I can get this one watched and reviewed before Saturday ends, I'll be in a good position and set up for Mother's Day. Considering the subject matter here, maybe THIS is a good lead-in for the holiday, of course, films about mothers are all over the place, like I started this year with "Anatomy of a Fall", "The Zone of Interest" and "Proxima", and those all had mothers in them. "Sun Dogs", "Lou", "To Leslie", they all had mothers in them and Allison Janney was in all three. Sally Field played a mother in "Places in the Heart" and "Murphy's Romance" in February, and "Till" and "Landscape with Invisible Hand" were a couple of April films with strong mother characters.
So what the heck, let's say Mother's Day Week kicks off today, we should get about four or five films with mothers in them before the week is done. Laura Dern carries over from "Trial by Fire".
THE PLOT: An irresponsible, drug-addicted, recently impregnated woman finds herself in the middle of an abortion debate when both parties attempt to sway her to their respective sides.
AFTER: Oh, right, the abortion thing. I don't know if that's appropriate for Mother's Day programming, or if that could be seen as being in bad taste. Whatever, I guess - this film's going to get me one step closer to Mother's Day programming no matter what. Anyway it's a big old world out there and there are all kinds of mothers - Mary Kay Place plays a very normal Midwestern evangelical one in today's movie, and Laura Dern plays a character who already had FOUR kids and is pregnant with her fifth, though whether she carries the baby to term or gets an abortion is kind of the point of the whole movie. No spoilers here on that point.
But, it's worth noting that she's on trial for a host of different charges, mostly based around her drug addiction, and her drug of choice is paint fumes, but you know, probably alcohol and other party drugs too, Ruth doesn't seem to be all that particular. But in this case the judge wants to charge her with threatening the health of her fetus, because I guess so far nothing else has worked with her, she's been in and out of rehab many times and she's been arrested and charged on the regular. I don't know, maybe it's time to move to another city where the cops don't know what substances you're addicted to, or maybe stop getting high outside, where they can see you? Oh, right, she needs proper ventilation for the cans of spray paint, right?
I don't know what changed in American culture, but you just don't hear as much these days about people huffing paint or sniffing glue - did it fall out of fashion, or did other drugs just become more readily available? Maybe the price of spray paint went up at some point? Or was it just because weed became legal in most places, and you can't really die from smoking weed, unless it's laced with something. But I think you can die from paint fumes or doing whippets if you get an air bubble in your brain. Man, it must be a good high if people are willing to risk their lives to feel it.
Ruth gets out on bail, but the money is posted by an older evangelical couple the Stoneys, who has their own agenda - they'll let Ruth live with them, and she DOES need a place to live, provided that she will pray with them before meals and most other times too, and that she agrees to have the baby. While they don't state this outright or make her sign a contract, it's kind of implied with all the praying. They do have that big house and it seems like they've taken in pregnant girls before, and they're connected to some larger organization that is thinking about offering young women money to carry their babies to term.
The Stoneys take Ruth to a crisis pregnancy center, which is clearly a front for the religious front, because they downplay the medical solutions to terminating pregnancies in favor of suggesting that the baby get born and adopted by a loving rich religious couple who can't have babies of their own. That doctor may be a real doctor, but he's working someone else's agenda if he doesn't let his patient know what ALL the medical options are. (Fake clinics like this did pop up around the U.S. a couple years ago when Roe v. Wade got overturned, forcing any teen girls who did NOT want to have a baby, or even wanted to ask about contraception, to travel to other states.)
But when they find Ruth after an anti-abortion rally, and she's been sniffing their son's modeling glue, they realize that they can't keep Ruth away from the drugs that could harm her baby - so their friend Diane offers to take her in, but Diane is secretly working for the abortion rights people, also she's a lesbian and therefore probably doesn't go to church as often as she says - at least not the same church the Stoneys go to, which probably teaches that God loves everyone equally, except for the gays and the pregnant teens and the non-white immigrants.
Once the Stoneys learn that their friend Diane was an embedded abortion rights activist, they declare a religious emergency and the small town is flooded with evangelicals and God-fearing protestors, and, well, there goes the neighborhood. There are massive candlelight vigils and people using surveillance equipment on the small farmhouse that Ruth is stashed in, and when the leader of the church flies in on his private jet, they announce that $15,000 has been raised to offer Ruth if she will agree to NOT get an abortion, and Ruth wants to jump at the chance. Hell, what's one more baby up for adoption when she already had four like that? But she's not thinking clearly, how long will $15,000 last, even in 1996, when she has to live on her own AND support a baby, not to mention her drug habit?
Harlan, an activist on the pro-choice side, offers Ruth a matching $15,000 if she agrees to have an abortion - he's got money from his Agent Orange settlment - and suddenly, Ruth is trying to figure out a way to keep all $30,000 from both sides, only there's not really a way to do that. She agrees to take the money from the pro-choice side, and agrees to go to the clinic, but fate kind of intervenes before that happens. And it's telling that in the midst of this whole battle between the factions, the person they're fighting over manages to disappear into the crowd. Meaning that neither side is really thinking about the people involved, they're just caught up in the ideology of it all. The "I'm right, you're wrong" school of politics goes back a long way, but in the last 8 or 10 years we've really seen the worst of it, how there's NO middle ground on any issue, just two polarized views on any given topic.
On the one hand, this film is more relevant than ever since the Supreme Court saw fit to make sure that abortion is no longer available in some states. However, it was directed by a man, so the message is a little unclear in some sense, because I'm not sure that men should be making the decisions for women, or even making movies about this topic, because there's no way they can be impartial experts on this. Who decided that a man should direct a film to draw attention to the way that the two opposing political factions in the U.S. were vying for control over the minds of young pregnant girls? Just saying.
This is based on the true story of a 28 year-old homeless North Dakota woman who had six children taken from her by the state, and after becoming pregnant again and arrested for publicly inhaling paint fumes, was bailed out by the Lambs of Christ organization, who offered her $10K if she gave birth, even if she gave the child up for adoption. But that woman did have the abortion, with the cost donated by a pro-choice organization, but she had to drive 100 miles to the nearest clinic. Something tells me the real-life story wasn't perceived as a comedy, but you know what, the movie version isn't all that funny either.
Directed by Alexander Payne (director of "The Holdovers")
Also starring Swoosie Kurtz (last seen in "Stanley & Iris"), Kurtwood Smith (last seen in "Mr. Saturday Night"), Mary Kay Place (last seen in "Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You"), Kelly Preston (last seen in "Gotti"), M.C. Gainey (last seen in "All About Steve"), Kenneth Mars (last seen in "Remembering Gene Wilder"), David Graf (last seen in "Rules of Engagement"), Kathleen Noone, Tippi Hedren (last seen in "I Heart Huckabees"), Burt Reynolds (last seen in "I Am Burt Reynolds"), Alicia Witt (last seen in "I Care a Lot"), Diane Ladd (last seen in "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore"), Lance Rome, Jim Kalal, Shea Degan, Vince Moreli, Marilyn Tipp, Lois Nemec (last seen in "Nebraska"), Tim Vandeberghe, Sebastian Anzaldo III, Mick McDonald, Okley Gibbs, Roberta Larson, Pam Carter, Steve Wheeldon, Billie Barnhouse-Diekman, John La Puzza, Susan Stern, Jeffrey L. Goos, James Devney, Tim Driscoll (last seen in "Downsizing"), Caveh Zahedi, Dennis Grant, Will Jamieson, Jeremy Sczepaniak, Delaney Driscoll, Judith Hart, Joan Pirkle, Lorie Obradovich, Michael Tourek (last seen in "Boss Level"), Katrina Christensen, John Bell, Jeffery Thomas Johnson.
RATING: 4 out of 10 flyers that turned up by the store's front counter, again (you were warned about this, Norm!)
No comments:
Post a Comment