The Supreme Court hasn’t been blue since I was a toddler. Considering there are far more blue voters in this country than red, that’s no small injustice. It wouldn’t matter, of course, if the court had truly culled nine superior non-partisan minds committed to what’s right. Recently, however, we’ve seen the court vote along party lines to allow money to vote, ignore corporate responsibility, and stop a recount to declare a Republican president. And very recently, in between Ruth Bader Ginsburg homages RBG and On the Basis of Sex, the Senate used every last bit of its narrow majority to ram a partisan frat boy into the highest court in the land with all the deliberation and care of a starving dog finally presented with a full bowl. The majority rule of the Supreme Court is now somewhere near Joseph McCarthy on the political spectrum. By the time it seeks to overturn Brown v. Board of Education, we might all wish there were nine Ruths.
On the wings of the uplifting documentary RBG, On the Basis of Sex sought to humanize and Hollywood-ize the wizened adjudicator by showing how li’l Ruthie got through law school and, subsequently, became a legend. The film begins with Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Felicity Jones) starting at Harvard Law, her first child already at home, and her husband, Martin Ginsburg (Armie Hammer) a second year law student. In the 1950s, Harvard Law had only very recently been open to womenfolk and Dean Sam Waterston sought to embarrass every one of them personally with an evening of wine and hazing. Don’t worry, Ruth can handle herself. Felicity Jones wouldn’t be my #1 choice to play RBG; she’s a little too smarmy and a little too unsure of herself to convince me of the transformation. (I’m quite sure, however, this is exactly what director Mimi Leder wanted to see of her heroine.) Felicity, however, is good at the one-on-one confrontations and does nothing in these moments to subtract from Ruth’s legend.
Leder asks for a healthy balance among career Ruth, parental Ruth, and Baby Ruth, the funster inspiring team charades and the soft side of ACLU boss Mel Wulf (Justin Theroux), who takes time from the business of the day to sing camp song “I’m a nut” at ACLU HQ. I’d say this would damage the reputation of the ACLU in the eyes of the right, but I doubt very seriously this film was gonna attract a ton of right wingers in the first place. Eventually, the film settles on what it came here to do: show the defeat of sex discrimination in film form, with RBG leading the cause of women’s rights, yay! It is both ironic and 100% fitting that the test case to overturn discriminatory law in the United States along sex lines involved a man (?!) denied a tax write-off for taking care of his fragile homebound mother. Yeah, that’s soooooo the United States one could cry – you wanna change law on the basis of discrimination? Show how white men are being hurt. BLM will only succeed once you prove that systemic racism and subsequent police brutality takes money away from Tom Brady.
One thing I’ve struggled mightily with over the past few years is understanding the limitations of the medium I’ve chosen. On the Basis of Sex is a perfect example. Martin Ginsburg was shelved with testicular cancer (!) while he and Ruth were in different years at law school. During that time, Ruth sat in his classes, typed his homework, and took care of their baby all while being a law student on her own, too. The movie plays off all of that noise with little more than a “so this happened…” That plot could be an entire TV series on its own. On the Basis of Sex, however, needed to get to Ruth’s big case, and its reflection on her own parenting, ASAP, so it leapt past these critical years in which the real Ruth Bader Ginsburg must have put in a superhuman effort to keep her family and careers together to go straight to an argument with her sassy teen feminist daughter.
The limitations didn’t stop there; it seems the limitations of the cinema are, dare I say? Unlimited. In Marshall, we saw how the selection of one case to epitomize a career is a huge disservice, especially when you pick the wrong case. Here, the case (Moritz v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue) is the right one, but the reflection is sadly shortened for dramatic purposes. Do we honestly believe appellate trials are come-from-behind sports? Do we believe that RBG was ever at a loss for words when it came to discrimination? Most importantly, do we believe the entire women’s movement –and RBG’s career- hinged upon Ruth Bader Ginsburg deciding to take the four-minute rebuttal herself? That’s not the RBG I know. Not one little bit. No person who sat on a red-majority court their entire Supreme Court life and still has the strength to offer glorious minority opinions could possibly have had an entire career made or lost in exactly four minutes of court time.
It is told that women were not meant
For subjects of a “he-manly” bent
Tell that to Bader
The aged crusader
For the cause, she was Heaven dis-sent
Rated PG-13, 120 Minutes
Director: Mimi Leder
Writer: Daniel Stiepleman
Genre: The power of dissent
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Feminists
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Sandra Day O’Connor (“Where’s my film?”)
