‘Ruby Ridge’: A Tragedy or an Inevitable End?

The West is wild again. You see it in the holed-up “freemen” of Montana’s Justus Township, who continue to frustrate the FBI after a two-month standoff.

And you see it in the fed-up Weavers. They left Cedar Falls, Iowa, heavily armed and scriptured, later declaring independence from the “Zionist Occupied Government” on their northern Idaho mountaintop known as Ruby Ridge. Then they awaited Armageddon--and, for two of them, it came.

When the smoke had cleared in 1992 after a shootout with the Feds and a subsequent 10-day siege, Vicki Weaver and her 14-year-old son, Sammy, who was shot in the back, lay dead on the floor of their remote plywood cabin. Patriarch Randy Weaver and family friend Kevin Harris lay wounded. The oldest Weaver girls, Sara, 16, and Rachel, 10, were unharmed, as was their infant sister, Elisheba, whom Vicki had been holding when a sniper’s bullet crashed into her head.

What really happened there--who was ultimately responsible and who shot first--is not clear from “Ruby Ridge: An American Tragedy,” a largely commendable yet also foggy two-parter that begins Sunday on CBS.

The movie correctly segregates the fringe beliefs of the racist, anti-tax-and-government Weavers and other Aryan Nation zealots from their rights as U.S. citizens to hold those beliefs. As long as they don’t bomb federal buildings in Oklahoma City, that is, or as Randy Weaver allegedly did, break other laws.

Did Weaver refuse to leave the family’s armed compound after being charged with selling a sawed-off shotgun to an undercover agent? Or was he the victim of government entrapment, as someone in “Ruby Ridge” charges? It’s a critical question, one relating to the outcome of the real-life trial that concluded this dark footnote of Americana, but one the TV story doesn’t specifically answer.

Nor does Lionel Chetwynd’s teleplay clarify whether federal agents moved against the Weavers prematurely--as some would claim they did later in the fiery holocaust at Waco, Texas--or whether their greatest sins at Ruby Ridge were merely confusion and bumbling ineptitude, which indirectly caused the death of a SWAT member during the initial gunfight that killed young Sammy Weaver.

Or is it possible instead that the Weavers got what was coming to them, that Randy and Vicki were casualties of the very culture of guns and paranoia in which they had immersed themselves, shaping their young children into an angry militia and arming them like soldiers to the extent that a violent outcome was inevitable?

Whatever the case, this story, based on reporter Jess Walter’s book, “Every Knee Shall Bow,” proceeds suspensefully under Roger Young’s direction while probing the dual natures of the Weavers and using this couple to trace the evolution of violent fanaticism amid seemingly ordinary folk.

When we meet Randy (Randy Quaid) and Vicki (Laura Dern), they are Old Testament-shouting fundamentalists whose railings against America’s “moral rot” place them no further than the outer edges of Iowa’s mainstream middle class. You admire their pioneer zest and family solidarity as they set out for the unknown.

By the time they are ensconced as their own small brigade on Ruby Ridge, however, their godliness has fully merged with white supremacy and they eye the multitudes beyond their circle of bigots as Zionist Occupied Government devils.

Quaid’s Randy is a gun-hugging palooka who channels his economic despair into hatred of the “niggers” and “Jew government” he holds responsible for his troubles. But it’s the superb Dern’s Vicki, the household’s prophet and strength, who best defines the paradox of the Weavers. Twisted by seething anger, her eyes blaze hatred from their deep sockets when not soft with feeling for her children.

It’s not the screaming skinheads and neo-Nazis but this face--the passionately devout matriarch consumed by love of family but venomous toward minorities--that lingers most chillingly as this story ends. And you wonder how many more there are just like her.

* “Ruby Ridge: An American Tragedy” airs 9-11 p.m. Sunday and Tuesday on CBS (Channel 2).