CRAVE CORNER: Ruth Bader Ginsburg biopic brings great woman's life into focus
As part of Original-Cin’s promotional partnership with Crave, we are highlighting an aspect of the service’s programming monthly. This month - on the occasion of Joe Biden’s inauguration as U.S. President - Kim Hughes revisits the 2018 Ruth Bader Ginsburg biopic, On the Basis of Sex.
By Kim Hughes
Even in death, Ruth Bader Ginsburg remains larger than life.
Her passing last September at age 87 saw a global outpouring of grief from those inspired by her fierce determination to better humanity through law. Her death also sparked a furious stateside row between Democrats and Republicans over her replacement on the Supreme Court, something the always-thinking Ginsburg herself had anticipated, requesting the appointment be deferred until after the November presidential election. No such luck thanks to the then governing schmuck.
Despite that outcome — and the renewed focus on it certain to coalesce during this month’s American presidential inauguration — Ginsburg’s reputation as a legal pioneer, rights activist, devoted wife and tough-as-nails, whip-smart human being was already embedded in the popular imagination.
That was in part thanks to On the Basis of Sex, the starry 2018 Hollywood biopic with Felicity Jones as a young Ginsburg abetted by Armie Hammer, Kathy Bates, Justin Theroux and Sam Waterston.
Though somewhat overshadowed during its theatrical release by the documentary RBG (also released in 2018 and also worth seeing), the film correctly drew solid reviews both for its depiction of a critical passage in Ginsburg’s life as well as the odious riptide of sexism she and much of the rest of the world perpetually swam against.
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On the Basis of Sex is strikingly of the moment. Scripted by Bader’s nephew Daniel Stiepelman with the Justice’s blessing (she made a cameo), On the Basis of Sex successfully splits the difference between capturing Ginsburg as a contemporary folk hero and as a fiercely ambitious intellectual competing for footing in an era when mixing a killer martini was the very height of wifely prestige.
The film follows two decades in Ginsburg’s early career, from her start as one of only nine females in a class of 500 at Harvard Law School in the 1950s, through to the early 70s when her role as a trailblazer for equal rights was gathering steam, spearheaded by Moritz v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue which she argued with her tax lawyer husband and which set the stage for overturning notions of gender discrimination under the U.S. constitution.
It’s an interesting choice of period to focus on. To some extent, it’s the least marquee era of Ginsburg’s entire career even though Jones’s ever-evolving wardrobe, from perky sweater sets to Diane von Fürstenberg wrap dresses, keeps us firmly abreast of the times.
Yet Stiepelman and filmmaker Mimi Leder seem as keen to emphasize Ginsburg’s home life — her very long and happy marriage to Martin Ginsburg, mother to kids Jane and James — as her successes in arguing that women be recognized as equal under the law, albeit first by showing that gender discrimination cut both ways.
The film argues that the latter-day Ginsburg, the one standing next to President Bill Clinton in 1993, was formed as much by her family life as by her egalitarian vision of the world. Certainly, scenes of arguments over brisket are more watchable than hours spent poring over dusty constitution-law tomes.
Much of the gender inequality stuff is carried by Waterston as Erwin Griswold, the spectacularly sexist dean of Harvard Law School (when Ginsburg attended) and later, U.S. Solicitor General when Ginsburg was trying the Moritz case.
Institutional sexism may not lend itself easily to visual interpretation, but the opposite approach — casting Griswold and his ilk as woman-hating supervillains — reduces a potent centuries-long, culturally supported practice to cookie-cutter badness. Then again, perhaps it was the only feasible way to illustrate the barbarism of gender-based inequality.
The film argues that the latter-day Ginsburg, the one standing next to President Bill Clinton in 1993, was formed as much by her family life as by her egalitarian vision of the world. Certainly, scenes of arguments over brisket are more watchable than hours spent poring over dusty constitution-law tomes.
Much of the gender inequality stuff is carried by Waterston as Erwin Griswold, the spectacularly sexist dean of Harvard Law School (when Ginsburg attended) and later, U.S. Solicitor General when Ginsburg was trying the Moritz case.
Institutional sexism may not lend itself easily to visual interpretation, but the opposite approach — casting Griswold and his ilk as woman-hating supervillains — reduces a potent centuries-long, culturally supported practice to cookie-cutter badness. Then again, perhaps it was the only feasible way to illustrate the barbarism of gender-based inequality.