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, 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 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’s climax is a court procedural that is prefaced by a very compelling scene where Ginsburg is rehearsing her delivery before fiery ACLU legal director Melvin L. Wulf (Theroux) and two other legal hotshots who shoot down her arguments with startling ease.

Ginsburg’s courtroom victories were not done deals, and to the film’s credit, that makes her scan as much more relatable than the soundbite-spewing, weightlifting dynamo depicted in the before-mentioned RBG.

Interestingly, numbers factor prominently in On the Basis of Sex: Ginsburg was turned down by 13 law firms despite being the top of her class at both Harvard and Columbia because she was female. For 10 years Griswold fought against allowing women to enter Harvard Law, where Ginsburg was in that rarefied group of 500 students just six years after women were granted entry.

And this: Ginsburg’s status as only the second female justice of four to be confirmed to the court (a figure ironically updated to five with the controversial recent appointment of Amy Coney Barrett) and the stunning 96-3 confirmation vote that sealed the deal.

Plus, there was her 56-year marriage to Martin Ginsburg, who died in 2010 and who Ginsburg nursed through an early battle with cancer by literally attending his classes while attending her own and tutoring him as he convalesced. This too is compelling documented in On the Basis of Sex.

Yup, even in death, Ruth Bader Ginsburg remains larger than life. More than that: she remains dear to the hearts of 21st century feminists for whom life alongside men remains a daily and very real battle for parity. And it’s just so super-cool that a mensch like Ginsburg got her very own movie.

On the Basis of Sex streams throughout January on Crave.