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There was a documentary earlier this year called RBG about Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the second woman ever appointed to the court. A woman who even people that disagree with her admit is extremely intelligent and accomplished (I could tell you stories). Sometimes there’s a cultural zeitgeist about this sort of thing — this movie was written around 2014, and the documentary started filming around 2015. So neither was explicitly something about today and this year, but as a way to acknowledge the work of many years.
On the Basis of Sex comes from director Mimi Leder and like many biopics, focuses on a specific portion of Ginsburg’s life. The movie starts with Ruth (Felicity Jones) as a first-year student at Harvard Law School where only very recently did any women get admitted at all. Naturally there are the seemingly cartoonish forms of sexism to be shown alongside Ruth’s high degree of competence, although it helps that this all happened to make it less clichéd.
Ruth’s husband Martin (Armie Hammer) is a year ahead and a talented student in his own right, but he falls ill with cancer forcing Ruth to take both of their classes while helping him and watching over their baby daughter Jane. The movie quickly jumps forward here and again a few times to gloss over the notes that are critical. Martin’s cancer goes into remission, he gets a great job, Ruth can’t find one herself due to sexism and anti-Semitism, and eventually becomes a professor at Rutgers Law School.
The movie skips again to the ‘meat’ of the movie, which takes place in or around 1970 as Martin uncovers an odd case about a man named Charles Moritz (Chris Mulkey) who suffered sex discrimination for his tax deductions. Since this is a man dealing with the discrimination, this becomes an opportunity for Ruth to start a series of suits that she hopes will end gender discrimination laws. They must deal with uncertain ally Mel Wulf from the ACLU (Justin Theroux) and enemies in the courts and government (played by Sam Waterston and Stephen Root as classic anti-feminist characters that were real people).
There are conflicts shown outside the obvious ones to show Ruth’s difficulty to become good at oral arguments instead of just knowing the law inside and out. This is creative license for the sake of drama, because it is noted in multiple sources that RBG never struggled with oral arguments in the slightest. There are also conflicts exaggerated with Mel Wulf and ones perhaps not so much with Ruth’s daughter Jane, who is a teenager and thus also in conflict.
There is never any real question of how the movie will end, nor is there a question of the perspective of the film. Felicity Jones does a good job here, expressing the inner and outer struggles of someone with a heart of steel (with a mostly consistent accent), although Armie Hammer really expressed himself well as an empathetic partner. There are a lot of great bits in the supporting roles, including Kathy Bates as civil liberties crusader Dorothy Kenyon.
The movie overall works more than it doesn’t, despite the exaggerated dramatic touches and over-reliance on legal jargon and technicalities at times. I do wonder how differently the movie might’ve been with Natalie Portman in the role, who was originally cast for the part. But there’s no real point in wondering the differences — the script here handles dialog decently, if very bluntly at times, and the direction is decent enough.
It’s not going to change any minds here, but in the realm of biopics, it works for the most part, quite well to tell the story it set out to tell.
On the Basis of Sex has a run time of 2 hours and is rated PG-13 for some language and suggestive content.
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