RBG Deserves More Than the Glossy, Feel-Good On the Basis of Sex

*In light of this global pandemic causing the Cannes study abroad for this year to be cancelled and for the festival to be postponed, I thought I'd add a little bit more of my writing that I never got around to posting here. The following is my film review from my application of the Ruth Bader Ginsburg biopic, On the Basis of Sex.

When my high school best friend and I wanted something uplifting to do one Thursday evening during a particularly dreary and drizzly winter break, we decided to do what the masses have done for decades: use the art of cinema to escape the confines of everyday life. The choice was quite simple really as we perused our top choices; Beautiful Boy was out, wanting to overcome instead of wallow in our seasonal depression, and we’d already seen Vice which gave us a large enough dose of righteous leftist anger to last us for the rest of the month. So our final decision to enter the rosy yet seemingly empowering world promised to us in the Ruth Bader Ginsburg biopic, On the Basis of Sex, came easily. Both of us being staunch admirers of the Supreme Court justice, readers of her biography Notorious RBG,  and self-declared feminists we figured what was a better suited film for two dejected college sophomore girls looking for a quick pick-me-up?

Well a quick pick-me-up, emphasis on the word quick (in a fleeting/shallow sense), was exactly what we were going to get. No more, no less. After one of the first scenes where Ruth’s husband, Marty, played by Armie Hammer, and Ruth, played by Felicity Jones, simply stare at each other in silence for a few beats too long, the camera eventually focusing on his half-eaten hospital lunch and still lingering for a few beats too long in more silence (I realize this was a tough moment about Marty’s testicular cancer but still), I soon realized that the pacing of the movie was going to be a lot different than I expected. This brings me to my ultimate gripe with On the Basis of Sex: the brief snapshot we actually get of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s life.

This movie encompasses the time between Ruth’s first day of law school and the day she wins her very first sex-discrimination case, maybe a fourth of RBG’s overall professional life. While I do recognize that this slower pacing, focused on a small chunk of her life story, permitted some valuable narrative moments, like a deeper exploration of her family dynamics or a fuller understanding of all the specific hoops she had to jump through just to get this first unassuming IRS case, I still couldn’t shake the sense of feeling cheated. RBG’s life thrums with so much more potential storytelling: who is this iron-willed mother of Ruth’s that comes up several times? Does her radical 15-year-old daughter make the change that she wishes to see in the world? What did Ruth’s first day on the Supreme Court look and feel like? On the Basis of Sex stays away from any of these deeper, albeit more challenging, narrative threads. Instead we get this ending: a grandiose jump cut from 1960’s era Ruth walking down the courthouse steps after winning her first case to a stalely inspirational transition shot of modern day RBG walking up the stairs, bypassing the forty-plus years of hard work it took to get there. I believe the more complex and valuable storytelling potential lies in between these two shots, instead of simply glossing over the decades of struggle Ruth went through in order to make incredible strides for gender equality. Because of all of this, I believe On the Basis of Sex didn’t do RBG or her story the full justice they both deserve.

So while I am disappointed with the essential plot of this film, which is more a criticism of the screenwriter, Daniel Stiepleman (unsurprising that a male writer failed to fully represent the intricate scope of RBG’s life’s work), this is not to say that I did not enjoy On the Basis of Sex. The 1950’s and 1960’s aesthetic, the amazing cast, and the overall themes of female empowerment still left me feeling satisfied enough and like I had gotten my $14’s worth.

First I found the historically accurate visuals of this film very beautiful and incredibly detailed. Particularly the costume design done by Isis Mussenden awed me from the very first scene. The viewer enters “On the Basis of Sex” through a sea of dark and gray tweed suits, clicking leather loafers, clouds of cigarette smoke, and the hum of chummy male voices to finally come up for air to the feminine tap of practical kitten heels and the refreshing swish of RBG’s richly blue dress, driving home Ruth’s stark contrast to the rest of the predominantly male student body. Felicity Jones dons multiple stunning dresses and pantsuits, a nod to the real-life Ruth, who is known to be a bit of a fashionista from what I remember in “Notorious RBG”. I also particularly loved how she would tie her hair back with colorful scarfs in the 1960’s periods of the film or the chunky wooden and beaded jewelry and earth toned vests and sweaters worn by Ruth’s flower power, activist college students at Rutgers University.

I would also like to commend Felicity Jones for a stellar performance. I felt like she conveyed Ginsberg’s personality very well: a cool and compassionate exterior yet with a cutting grit lying underneath. Even when handling overtly cheesy lines such as, “Neither is the word ‘freedom’, sir,” in response to a condescending male judge telling her, “The word ‘woman’ isn’t mentioned once in the constitution,” her delivery always came off as earnest and fearless, salvaging these at times over-the-top moments of dialogue. Also, Armie Hammer portrayed the lovable, supportive Martin Ginsburg very well. Jones’ and Hammer’s romantic chemistry definitely played a role in the feel-good, pick me up aspect of this film, which I won’t deny I enjoyed in a gooey guilty pleasure sort of way. Also what more can you ask than a raging feminist Kathy Bates cameo? I have seen some criticism of the casting of Felicity Jones, a non-Jewish actress, in the role of a Jewish woman, but honestly I felt that they acknowledged Ginburg’s Jewish heritage enough in the film and she had a similar enough appearance to RBG that this didn’t strike me as problematic while watching it. This type of casting just seems symptomatic to the Hollywood cookie cutter mold this movie emerged from.

In conclusion, I would say this cookie cutter-ness is simply the root cause of why this movie falls slightly flat to me. On the Basis of Sex had so much potential but instead gave us another risk-averse beautification of the truth. Watching this felt like looking at the world through rose-colored glasses: the ending sending a message akin to, “Look! We’ve solved sexism! Yay!” But sometimes when it’s rainy and cold and you’re nineteen and slowly beginning to realize that you will always be at a disadvantage because you’re a woman and sexism is in fact nowhere near solved, then that’s what you need to watch. I just wish Ruth Bader Ginsberg could’ve gotten something more.