NO STEVE BUSCEMI PART?

By RICHARD CORLISS

As independent films have won a significant niche in the U.S. movie market, they have fallen into some comfortable ruts. Too many Amerindies play like endless episodes of Friends or elaborate revenge scenarios against anyone who hurt the feelings of the filmmaker when he or she was a kid. So it's nice to find a couple of pictures going against the grain.

Citizen Ruth and Sling Blade are directorial debuts with regional roots (Omaha, Nebraska, and Benton, Arkansas). And both feature star turns with a twist: Burt Reynolds as an Operation Rescue-style evangelist, John Ritter as a gay, discount-store manager. But these films have more serious novelties to offer. Citizen Ruth is, lo and behold, a political satire, and Sling Blade has the richness of a fine Southern Gothic novel.

Ruth Stoops (Laura Dern) has four kids she hardly ever sees and dozens of convictions for snorting paint thinner. Now she is pregnant again, and an exasperated judge has told her to get an abortion or go to jail. That's enough to make Ruth a human placard for rival zanies: a band of pro-lifers called the Baby Savers (led by Reynolds) and a cell of pro-choice lesbians (Swoosie Kurtz and Kelly Preston). You can expect the competing passions to cancel one another out. And you can count on Stoops to conquer.

Righteous people making miserable the lives they would save--that should be fun. But tyro auteur Alexander Payne cannot shape or propel his own good material. He lets things dawdle when briskness would be a boon, and defeats the gung-ho efforts of Dern and other worthy actors. Citizen Ruth means to evoke such '40s comedies as The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, but it is less Preston Sturges than depressed and turgid.

Like Ruth, Sling Blade's Karl Childers (Billy Bob Thornton) is a brain-damaged naif taken in by strangers. When he was 12, Karl killed his mother and her lover. Now, 25 years later, he is released from a mental hospital and befriended by a boy (Lucas Black) who could be a healthier version of the lonely, imperiled child Karl was and still is. Rural Arkansas is home to some very decent people--the boy Frank, his mother and her boss (Ritter), Karl and his various keepers--and one or two moral skunks, notably the loutish boyfriend (Dwight Yoakam) of Frank's mom. Sling Blade is about the difficulty good folks have living with rotten ones. The film keeps you guessing whether it will be a horror movie or a love story. Turns out to be a bit of both.

Sling Blade may be too scrupulously attentive to the rhythms and speech of the small-town South; it easily breaks the all-time record for use of the word reckon. But as incarnated in writer-director Thornton's laconic bass voice and wonderfully shambling gait, Karl is a memorable, affecting creature--so gentle he daren't sleep on an offered bed for fear of spoiling the room's perfect primness, so righteous he will consider killing to protect his adoptive family. Sling Blade meanders when Karl isn't driving it, but for the first half-hour and the last, it has the long, clean lines of an American classic.

--By Richard Corliss