‘On the Basis of Sex’ spotlights landmark cases

Biopic shows Bader Ginsburg battling sexism

Posted

“On the Basis of Sex” serves as an engaging, illuminating look at two early but profoundly influential court cases tried by future Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but it succeeds by being so much more.

One of the reasons this film struggled to find funding was because of one of its most endearing and realistic aspects, which is its portrayal of the loving, mutually respectful relationship of Ruth Bader and Marty Ginsburg as equal partners in marriage, from their years as classmates at Harvard Law to the tax law case they litigated together before the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Felicity Jones captures Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Brooklyn accent and determined attitude, while Arnie Hammer portrays Marty Ginsburg, who died in 2010, as leavening his wife’s more serious side with an easygoing gregariousness and a quietly supportive nature.

Not that the Ginsburgs aren’t shown having significant arguments. We see Ruth calling Marty out on his dismissive attitude toward the casual slights she has to endure as a woman, which don’t initially strike him as being that big of a deal, simply because he knows her value.

Marty is depicted as quickly learning his lesson when the next offhand remark by his boss gives him a deeper appreciation of what his wife has to put up with.

This film reserves no shortage of scorn for the unabashedly sexist men in authority against whom Ruth is pitted, at Harvard, and later while attempting to set a legal precedent against gender-based discrimination through the tax law case she and Marty would present to the Court of Appeals in 1971.

And while this gives us a great chance to see veteran character actors like Stephen Root and Sam Waterston in glowering patriarch mode, what’s perhaps more telling is the film’s indictment of supposedly “woke” men.

The head of a New York City-based law firm to which Ruth applies is shown as sympathizing with, and even encouraging, her righteous indignation at first, until we catch him stealing a glimpse down her blouse, and telling her that his lawyers’ wives would be made “jealous” if they were to work with a woman.

Likewise, Justin Theroux plays Mel Wulf, then the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, as searching for any excuse not to make the ACLU a partner on the Ginsburgs’ case on the grounds that a failure by Ruth could set women’s rights back decades.

Even when Wulf does agree to have the ACLU sign onto the case, Theroux shows him diminishing her skills as a lawyer, right on down to the age-old sexist refrain of asking her to smile more, and undermining her as a co-litigant by attempting to cut a deal with the government behind her back.

As the film’s director, Mimi Leder avoids the sort of overwrought emotion that is surely tempting to apply to such a biopic, while Daniel Stiepleman’s screenplay benefits from the authenticity of his being the Ginsburgs’ nephew.

But for my money, it’s Michael Grady who’s the unsung hero of this film by equaling the feat of fellow cinematographer Tak Fujimoto on Jonathan Demme’s “The Silence of the Lambs.”

Just as Fujimoto made audiences identify with fictional heroine Clarice Starling by filming shots from her perspective, subjecting viewers to a literal “male gaze” at several points, so too do Grady’s shots highlight the constant background sexism of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s life through a series of distinct visual cues, starting with the running joke of Ruth searching for fellow female faces in otherwise all-male crowds.

Bonus points go to the performances of Kathy Bates as Dorothy Kenyon, lifelong defender of civil liberties, and Cailee Spaeny as Ruth’s daughter, Jane Ginsburg, who butts heads with her mother yet ultimately tells her not to quit her case. Mother and daughter are shown as equally driven by their fierce intellects and uncompromising principles.

In its depiction of the Ginsburgs’ marriage, and of the court cases they used to combat gender-based discrimination, “On the Basis of Sex” makes the case that men also suffer when women are pigeonholed into limited roles, and that men and women can (and should) be partners, rather than opponents.

That remains a relevant message. The Ginsburgs’ tax law case wasn’t decided by the 10th Circuit Court until 1972. None of this is ancient history. The struggle still goes on.