Mimi Leder (2018)
The climax of On the Basis of Sex takes place in the US Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit in Denver, Colorado. As proceedings are about to begin, the camera moves across the words of a motto, engraved on the wall behind the judges’ bench, that reads ‘Reason is the soul of all law’. Except in a Hollywood courtroom, where dramatic timing and effect matter more. The husband-and-wife team of Martin D Ginsburg (Armie Hammer) and his wife Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Felicity Jones) are presenting an appeal on behalf of a man legally disadvantaged because he is a man. In the climax to the climax, the Ginsburgs are required to give their closing address in no more than four minutes. As Marty rises to speak, Ruth touches his arm to indicate that she’ll conclude their oral arguments. He contains his astonishment and looks at her steadily. She gathers herself for the peroration. This takes care of the first of the four minutes.
It’s not surprising that Marty expected to do the talking. Addressing the three judges earlier in the appeal hearing, Ruth was, as those close to her feared she might be, tense, halting and humour-free yet she now, suddenly and crucially, finds her voice. She expresses what has been another motto – a mantra – of Mimi Leder’s film: ‘A court ought not to be affected by the weather of the day, but will be by the climate of the era’. It’s 1970: Ruth argues that the law needs to change to reflect the evolution from traditional men-only/women-only roles that is gathering momentum in American society. We knew beforehand, from discussion among the Ginsburgs’ legal opponents, that one of the three appeal judges might be sympathetic to the case Ruth and Marty are making. Judge Doyle (Gary Werntz) has pro-civil rights form, although the questions he’s asked at the hearing confirm that he sees gender equality as very different from race equality. The effect of Ruth’s clinching arguments on the other two judges (Ben Carlson and Francis X McCarthy) is more conspicuous. A few screen minutes ago, they were making smug misogynistic wisecracks at her expense but she’s wiped the smile off their faces. They are now solemn and chastened. They know, as Doyle knows, she’s right. The three judges even let her carry on talking beyond the prescribed time limit. To be fair to Felicity Jones, she doesn’t inject false histrionics into the closing address but, then, she doesn’t need to. Mychael Danna’s music, rising to its own inspirational big finish, does it for her.
The arrival of On the Basis of Sex in cinemas so soon after the documentary RBG emphasises the limitations of this by-the-numbers biographical drama. The die is cast right from the start. The film begins in the autumn of 1956; the massed ranks of the new intake of students to the Harvard law school march towards its entrance, Ruth apparently the only woman among them. On the soundtrack, a chorus of male voices sings a hearty college anthem (‘Ten Thousand Men of Harvard’) but Ruth smiles about her in innocent wonder as she enters this august seat of learning. Until, that is, the law school dean, Erwin Griswold (Sam Waterston), formally welcomes the new students and tells them what ‘a Harvard man’ is, and expected to do[1]. Ruth now uneasily catches the eye of another girl student in the vast hall, then another.
After a quick introduction to her home life – she and Marty already have an infant daughter – Ruth goes to a soirée hosted by Griswold and his wife (Wendy Crewson) for the new female students (a total of nine in an intake of five hundred), who sit round a dining table with the law school’s all-male professoriate. Griswold seems to intend the evening to be an exercise in ritual humiliation. He asks each of his female guests in turn to summarise who they are, where they’re from and ‘why you’re occupying a place at Harvard that could have gone to a man’. The first girl to speak (Julia Borsellino) explains that, once she has her degree, she’ll return to Minneapolis and partner her father in his law firm there. This is OK by Griswold. The second girl (Angela Galuppo), already a Mt Holyoke graduate, explains that her mother expected her to get married but she didn’t want to do that, or to be a teacher or a nurse. Griswold shuts her up – ‘That’s not a good reason’ – before she can say any more.
So far, so obvious but just how obvious becomes clear only when Ruth, whose turn it is next, gets up to speak. In doing so, she knocks an ashtray noisily off the table and Griswold glares in contempt. After she’s given her name and birthplace, he asks, ‘And why are you here, Miss Ginsburg?’, she replies, ‘Mrs Ginsburg, actually. My husband is in the second-year class. ….. I’m at Harvard to learn about his work. So I can be a more patient and understanding wife’. At which point, the girl who was understandably crushed by the dean’s rubbishing of her motivation for being at Harvard giggles, as do others. Griswold is made to look a fool – as he will every time he opens his mouth during the film and Ruth bests him. This repeatedly got chuckles in the audience at the Curzon in Wimbledon though I couldn’t help feeling that Mimi Leder and the screenwriter Daniel Stiepleman, by making Griswold a reliable laughing stock, rendered his male chauvinism less potently offensive than it should have been.
The narrative’s best feature is that it jettisons a greatest hits approach to Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s career in the courts following her years as an academic. Instead of dramatising her several successes before the Supreme Court in the mid-1970s, On the Basis of Sex streamlines matters by concentrating on a single earlier and lower-profile case. Charles Moritz was a man in his early sixties who had to hire a nurse to help him care for his aging mother so that he could continue to work. The law of the time specifically limited tax deductions for nursing care of this kind to ‘a woman, a widower or divorcée, or a husband whose wife is incapacitated or institutionalized’. A court ruled that Moritz, a bachelor, was therefore ineligible for such benefit. The Ginsburgs, working with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), filed an appeal on his behalf and won. Described by her biographer Jane Sharron De Hart as the case whereby Ginsburg ‘found her foundational argument’ against gender-based discrimination, Moritz vs Commissioner of Internal Revenue drew attention to a plethora of laws enshrined in assumptions that men worked to provide for the family while women stayed at home to care for their husband and children. It was also an example of Ruth’s readiness to represent males as well as females on the receiving end of discrimination.
Daniel Stiepleman has told The Wrap he focused on Moritz for another reason too – it was a case where ‘the political and the personal were intertwined’. By this, Stiepleman presumably means the Ginsburgs worked on it as a legal double act – Marty handling the tax law side of things, Ruth the gender equality aspect. While this may be historically accurate, the effect is to make Marty’s promotion of Ruth’s career less remarkable than (on the evidence of the RBG documentary) it actually was. On the Basis of Sex includes a joke about her notoriously bad cooking and a scene where Marty has prepared food for their guests but offers a limited picture of the ahead-of-his-time support he gave Ruth in the professional as well as the domestic sphere.
Even though Marty was a good-looking young man, having Armie Hammer incarnate him seems a typical example of Hollywood glamorisation. Hammer gets off to a promising start nevertheless; he’s pleasantly relaxed and humorous in his first scenes. Then, while the Ginsburgs are playing charades with friends, Marty keels over in pain. Hospital tests reveal the testicular cancer that struck him down while he was still a Harvard student. His collapse in the middle of having fun turns out to encapsulate the film’s disappointing characterisation of him. Ruth’s devotion and determination help him beat the cancer but so conscious is Marty of the game-changing importance of his wife’s life and work that he is rarely light-hearted again. He increasingly addresses Ruth in the language of biopic. As they prepare to enter the Denver courthouse, he tells her, ‘You’re ready for this … you’ve been ready for this your whole life’.
There are livelier performances in smaller roles – notably from Justin Theroux and Jack Reynor. They are, respectively, Mel Wulf, the ACLU’s legal director, and Jim Bozarth, the Ginsburgs’ adversary in the Moritz appeal hearing. As the appellant, Chris Mulkey has a quiet, melancholy dignity. Kathy Bates is entertaining enough as the attorney and activist Dorothy Kenyon, although Bates’s brusque feistiness is predictable by now and she seems to have lost a bit of her timing.
On the Basis of Sex depends heavily, however, on the actress playing the heroine and Felicity Jones isn’t very satisfying. This is the latest piece of casting to make you wonder why a role has gone to a British rather than an American actor. The real Ruth, as RBG illustrated, was unusually beautiful in her younger days whereas Jones is remarkably but conventionally pretty. She doesn’t remotely suggest a Brooklynite child of Jewish immigrants. Still, although there are times when she needs a bit more spark, her conscientious, faintly humourless presence feels right for the earnest young bluestocking who can’t be easily appealing even in private, let alone as a public performer. Jones’s natural lack of flamboyance helps steer her clear of hollow bravura. Yet when Mimi Leder finally plays a brief recording of the real RBG’s voice – quoting the words of the nineteenth-century equal rights pioneer Sarah Grimke (‘I ask no favor for my sex; all I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks’) – you realise that unshowy Felicity Jones has sounded relatively theatrical after all.
There are much more flagrant examples of Leder’s nervousness that the audience is going to find all this legal stuff boring – as when Griswold, Bozarth and another anti-progressive academic (Stephen Root) loudly discuss the Moritz case walking near the Pentagon, the walking designed to prove that they’re in a motion picture. Although it’s somewhat artificial, a scene at the Ginsburgs’ home – a rehearsal for the appeal hearing, with Mel Wulf and others playing the judges and grilling Ruth – works somewhat better.
At the end of the film, the real Ruth Bader Ginsburg makes a fleeting appearance, as herself (her octogenarian head weirdly CGI-ised onto Felicity Jones from the shoulders down). She has also expressed approval of On the Basis of Sex and this is hardly unexpected: Daniel Stiepleman is her nephew and it’s central to his purpose to create a picture of a very happy family. The closing legends tell us about the career achievements of not only Ruth but also Marty and their two children. (Tensions between Ruth and her daughter Jane (Cailee Spaeny) are quickly resolved to enable Jane to join the fight for justice.) Those who go to see Mimi Leder’s movie never having heard of its protagonist may find it educational. Those who know about and admire her and buy a ticket principally in the hope that she’ll be lionised and they’ll come out politically vindicated, may feel they’ve got their money’s worth. This viewer found it embarrassing to watch an extraordinary individuality swaddled in biopic clichés and disquieting, at a time when the family firm occupying the White House has given American nepotism a worse name than ever before, to see RBG and her loved ones apotheosised largely through the efforts of a close relative.
28 February 2019
[1] ‘A Harvard man is intelligent, of course. But he is also tenacious. He is a leader devoted to the rule of law. … He is mindful of his country. Loyal to tradition. And he is respectful and protective of our institutions.’
