Meet the ‘notorious’ RBG
RBG (PG, 98 mins) Directed by Julie Cohen and Betsy West
Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★★★1⁄2
Ruth Bader Ginsberg is one of the most formidable and influential legal minds to have occupied the American judicial landscape in the 20th and 21st centuries.
That she has now also become a pop-culture icon, a series of memes, the subject of a couple of fantastic murals in her native Brooklyn and an occasional name-check in rap lyrics might seem unlikely. But it is these apparently contradictory representations of Ginsberg that this new documentary RBG embraces and uses as its stepping off point, to tell the story – so far – of a woman who has literally changed the world.
Film-makers Julie Cohen and Betsy West approach Ginsberg with all due respect. She is – after all – a Supreme Court justice who earns and maintains the respect of law makers and politicians, from the furthest right to the deepest left. But Ginsberg is also disarmingly open, frank, approachable and often very funny.
Ginsberg’s journey from Harvard – where she was one of nine women in an intake of over 500 – to the highest echelons of public service makes for an incredible yarn. Ginsberg is incandescently smart, but it was her gargantuan work ethic that pushed her past her peers. While caring for a deathly ill husband and raising a young child, Ginsberg became the first woman to sit on the Harvard Law Review and then graduated first-equal after transferring to Columbia Law School in New York city.
The now 85-year-old still regularly works 18-hour days, while maintaining a work-out regime and finding time to appear on stage in operas.
Ginsberg took six cases to the US Supreme Court and won five of them before she was appointed to that Court by President Clinton. Ginsberg’s first great victory was on behalf of a widowed father who had been denied a ‘‘single mother’s benefit’’. Establishing the principle of gender equality on his behalf opened up a beachhead for Ginsberg’s subsequent actions on behalf of women. RBG is a deft, entertaining and expertly puttogether documentary. Like its subject, it is funny, endearing and truly likeable, with a spine of pure steel.
As a primer in recent history, and a reminder of how shockingly recent some victories for basic human rights have been in the ‘‘land of the free’’, RBG isa necessary and recommended film.