Local theater also got 2018’s On the Basis of Sex, the biopic (and non-documentary) film about Ruth Bader Ginsberg. There’s also a documentary about her called RBG (which I also saw after this one).
This film covers the future supreme court justice as one of a handful of female students at Harvard in the late 50s and then jumps forward to the early 70s where she argues a case before a circuit court. It covers some home life issues with her husband and daughter as well.
Overall, I’d say I was mildly disappointed by this film. The film focuses on (in my mind) the wrong thing. It doesn’t cover any arguments she had before the supreme court, it doesn’t cover her nomination to the court, and it doesn’t cover anything she did on the supreme court. Instead, it covers a not-insignificant case where a man wasn’t allowed to take a tax break “on the basis of sex”. As in, he’s a bachelor care-giver to his aging mother but the IRS tax code doesn’t allow a man to be a caregiver. It’s the first case (I gather) that she argues in order to get a wedge in about gender exclusive laws. So its an important case but its not the most interesting thing about the subject of the film.
That is, of course, just a personal opinion. But I can’t argue I wasn’t sitting in the theater wondering if we ever going to get to the supreme court. But this is the kind of biopic that decides to focus only on the early career of its subject and then toss up some white text on the screen letting us know she also, you know, went on to bigger, more important things.
It’s certainly earnest but it has this weird low-key would-be soaring soundtrack that is a bit of a failure-to-launch. The dramatic music kicks in almost like a machine to tell us how heroic a given scene is… but it’s not a very good, dramatic, or compelling soundtrack. It feels like someone saw a bunch of biopics and had an idea of how to make this music work but didn’t pull it off well. It made me feel like the movie was somehow both failing to be grandiose but also trying to be grandiose-by-numbers.
So, yeah, I did learn some things about the early days of the sex discrimination case law and about RBG herself. So, to that extent, the movie works. But it’s one of those cases where you come away thinking there’s so much more to know and whether or not a documentary would have done a better job. It’s also a bit of a feather-weight at being a good dramatic biopic… which means no matter how important the actual case covered in the flick was, it never really achieved that emotional heft it was so obviously trying for. But it’s still a decent movie that covers a little bit of history.
Score: 80