Citizen Ruth (Alexander Payne, 1996)

Laura Dern and Kurtwood Smith in Citizen Ruth

Ruth Stoops: Laura Dern
Diane Siegler: Swoosie Kurtz
Norm Stoney: Kurtwood Smith
Gail Stoney: Mary Kay Place
Rachel: Kelly Preston
Harlan: M.C. Gainey
Dr. Charlie Rollins: Kenneth Mars
Blaine Gibbons: Burt Reynolds
Jessica Weiss: Tippi Hedren

Director: Alexander Payne
Screenplay: Alexander Payne, Jim Taylor
Cinematography: James Glennon
Production design: Jane Ann Stewart
Film editing: Kevin Tent
Music: Rolfe Kent

"Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim," said George Santayana, a statement quoted by Chuck Jones in commenting on his inspiration for Wile E. Coyote's futile pursuit of the Road Runner. It applies equally well to most of the characters in Citizen Ruth, with the exception of Ruth herself, whose only clear aim, getting high, she never forgets. Director Alexander Payne and co-screenwriter Jim Taylor crafted an audacious satire on political fanaticism, focused specifically on the American furor over abortion, but still applicable 22 years later to almost all of the many political controversies, from gun control to collusion with foreign powers, that dominate our divided discourse. Ruth Stoops is a hopeless case, too addled by whatever she can get her hands on to produce a state of narcosis and too much a product of societal breakdown to ever be the focus of anybody's cause. But when a judge, learning that Ruth is pregnant with a fifth unwanted child, suggests that he might go easy on sentencing her if she'll have an abortion, she is first snapped up by right-to-life advocates and then blunders her way into the opposing camp of freedom-to-choose proponents. Eventually, her decision (which Ruth is incapable of arriving at rationally) begins to be swayed by a bidding war between the two groups, each of which offers her money -- a rather paltry $15,000 that seems like a fortune to the indigent Ruth -- either to have the baby or to abort the fetus. There are those who find the plight of Ruth no laughing matter, and they're right. But Payne manages to stay on the far side of reality in his treatment of the subject, and he benefits from a company of actors capable of teetering on the edge of caricature without actually lapsing into it. Laura Dern manages to find something sweetly naive in Ruth that makes her headlong self-destructiveness both touching and funny. She is a hopeless case, just as a resolution of the abortion debate seems hopeless, too.

Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 1999)

John Malkovich in Being John Malkovich

Craig Schwartz: John Cusack
John Horatio Malkovich: John Malkovich
Lotte Schwartz: Cameron Diaz
Maxine Lund: Catherine Keener
Dr. Lester: Orson Bean
Floris: Mary Kay Place
Charlie: Charlie Sheen

Director: Spike Jonze
Screenplay: Charlie Kaufman
Cinematography: Lance Acord
Production design: K.K. Barrett
Music: Carter Burwell

I find it interesting that David Fincher has a cameo -- as the critic Christopher Bing in the documentary about Malkovich's puppeteering career -- in Being John Malkovich, because Fincher and Spike Jonze seem to me to represent two distinct career paths in contemporary filmmaking. Both came out of the heyday of music videos, with their quirky and extravagant special effects and camera tricks, but Fincher has followed a more "commercial" direction with adaptations of bestselling novels like Gone Girl (2014) and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011). His films are fine ones, with professional polish and careful attention to storytelling. He seems to me a major director who subsumes himself into the material, the way such classic studio-era directors as William Wyler and George Cukor did. Jonze, however, has steered a steady course into the offbeat and personal through his four features. Being John Malkovich, Adaptation (2002), Where the Wild Things Are (2009), and Her (2013) are all marked by an irrepressibly eccentric imagination, an ability to think things not often thought, to imagine the impossible and make it plausible. The collaboration with the similar sensibility of Charlie Kaufman on the first two films suggested that the writer had the imagination and the director the skill to visualize it, but Jonze's later films show him to be a great assimilator, able to merge the ideas of his writers and the interpretations of his actors into a special and unique whole. Being John Malkovich plays with its themes of power and sexuality brilliantly. Jonze and Kaufman affirm the value of a hungry imagination with their special insights into the way we are all striving to transcend the limitations imposed by consciousness confined in a body. We probably wouldn't choose to be John Malkovich, but the possibility of escaping into someone else, even for only 15 minutes, tantalizes us.