In 2018 there were two movies made about Ginsburg, the documentary, RGB, and the narrative feature, On the Basis of Sex. The reason I waited was in order to see the one of those two I hadn't seen, On the Basis of Sex, on Monday night, allowing me to write this post today.
I probably should have watched RGB again, because that would have given me a better sense of the Ruth Bader Ginbsurg I knew -- which is to say, the one I have followed with greater and lesser periods of intensity since she was appointed to the Supreme Court by Bill Clinton back in 1993. I can't claim to be an expert on her life, but I loved what I learned about her in RGB, which only bolstered the impressions I'd garnered from the decisions she'd written and the stances she'd taken.
Alas, On the Basis of Sex is not really worthy of her.
There's nothing wrong with it, really -- well, a few things that I might get into in a moment -- but it's just a very vanilla movie largely lacking in surprises. It's pretty much one of those by-the-numbers biopics that a mediocre director (which maybe Mimi Leder is, Deep Impact notwithstanding) could make in his or her sleep. Neither Felicity Jones' lead performance nor the script does much of a job revealing what made Ginsburg exceptional.
And there's a part or two that actually works against what I would think a Ginsburg movie should be doing. I think it's good that On the Basis of Sex doesn't depict her as a saint, but it seems to have an inordinate number of characters who find her disagreeable -- most notably, her own daughter, at least at the start. And yes, this is a period of Ginsburg's life (most of it occurs in the year 1970, exactly 50 years ago) when she was still coming into herself, the person she would become.
But about that. The key case that started to make her career was when she challenged a tax law that prevented a caregiver from getting a tax benefit for providing care to a parent. He would have qualified as a woman, but did not as a man. So while her interests were to attack laws that discriminated against women on the basis of sex (there's the title), she keenly did so by attacking a law that discriminated against a man, thereby proving that the reverse form of discrimination was also unconstitutional. She took into consideration the existing biases of the male judges to convince them of the validity of her argument.
The thing is, and this may be true to history, Ginsburg didn't come across the case herself. At least as depicted in On the Basis of Sex, her husband Marty (Armie Hammer) brought it to her. And she didn't even immediately realize, without additional prodding from him, the potential breadth of the significance of the case. As she was a professor at the time, she just wanted to go back to preparing for her next day's law school lecture.
Even if it was true, I didn't love the decision to have a man essentially making her career for her, even a man as undoubtedly terrific as Marty Ginsburg is supposed to have been. It made me wonder whether she would have had a quiet little career as a law professor if it hadn't been for him ... which is not what I wanted to wonder while watching a movie about Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Still, I was glad to be in her company on Monday night as I still mourned her loss. And that's literally the case in one of the film's final images, when we see a modern-day, real-life Ginsburg walking some stairs into the halls of justice. (It's a famous building that I just didn't identify right away.)
She lived a good long life, succumbing to cancer at age 87, though just two months longer might have secured her legacy on the court. By dying just before the presidential election, she left the door open to Trump and McConnell pushing through a vote on her replacement in the next six weeks -- a scandalously shameless act of hypocrisy that should come as little surprise to anybody anymore.
But I don't want to focus on the political fallout of her passing. Today we should, and I do, remember how Ruth Bader Ginsburg spent her career as a champion of the underrepresented, a dogged fighter who refused to cave to bullies like Trump. Some say she should have retired when Obama was president so he could have named a like-minded replacement, but Ginsburg got a late start on her career, and didn't feel like she had finished her duty after just 20 years on the court. As On the Basis of Sex reminds us, she was still "just" a law professor at age 37, and was already 60 years old when appointed by Clinton. She wanted to serve until she was 90, a 30-year court tenture, but she came up three years short.
Ginbsurg's appointment reminds us of a simpler time, when the main calculation in a potential appointment was not how young the appointee was, and therefore, how long this person would have to exert his or her will on the court. I'm sure Trump is out looking for the most conservative and nominally accomplished 38-year-old he can find. Clinton didn't worry about that; in Ginsburg he saw the best qualified candidate, and he rewarded her years of dignified service on the bench, championing causes they both believed in, that they both knew were best for the country.
And I'm sure she made him proud until the day she died.
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