Felicity Jones shows her mettle
Felicity Jones should have got an Oscar nomination for her portrayal of the woman who fought a lifelong battle against sexist lawyers...
Until recently, all I really knew about Ruth Bader Ginsburg was that she was short, elderly and, even at the age of 85, still both a force for liberal good in the US Supreme Court and a thorn in the side of President Trump.
Cinematically speaking, however, RBG, as she is often known, is having quite a year, and I now know quite a lot a more. A documentary charting her long life and career, called simply RBG, was released here last month and is up for two Oscars at tonight’s ceremony in Los Angeles.
And now along comes a feature-film dramatisation, On The Basis Of Sex, which isn’t up for any Oscars (British star, Felicity Jones, is entitled to feel a little miffed about that) but does do a very watchable job of introducing a wider audience to both the woman and her work.
Do you want to know why Ginsburg became only the second female judge ever to sit in America’s highest court? This is the film that explains why. Even for Irish audiences, it’s an important, epoch-shaping story.
In the first of several scenes that reminded me of the old American legal drama The Paper Chase, we begin at Harvard Law School in 1956, where Ruth (Jones) stands out for two reasons.
Not only is she one of the few women in a veritable sea of sober, grey-suited young men, she’s already married to one of them – Martin Ginsburg, played here with customary, lightly worn charm by Armie Hammer. At home the pair are devoted to each other (they would remain happily married for 56 years until his death in 2010) but they work well together, too. When Martin has an early brush with cancer, it is Ruth who goes to his lectures and types up his essays, despite the fact that the couple already have a baby. A few years later, when she’s being fobbed off by every law firm in New York (either for being a woman or for being Jewish or both), it is he who urges her not to compromise. This is a couple who support each other professionally as well as personally.
But eventually she does compromise, taking an academic job where – riding the first wave of late-Sixties feminism while all the time constrained by her Fifties upbringing – she specialises in the law and women’s rights. But it’s only when Martin, by now a successful tax lawyer, unearths an esoteric dispute between the Internal Revenue Service and a home carer that the pair realise they have the chance of fundamentally changing American law.
Paradoxically, they believe they can advance the cause of women’s rights and sexual equality because the carer looking
‘The pair realise they have the chance of fundamentally changing US law’
after an elderly relative is a man. It is he, the Ginsburgs allege, who is being discriminated against ‘on the basis of sex’, which turns out not to be a cheap come-on of a title, as I initially suspected, but an oft-repeated American legal term. Nevertheless, I let out a silent cheer when someone eventually suggests ‘gender’ might be a better word.
On The Basis Of Sex is a good film but not a great one. Its director, Mimi Leder, still best known for Deep Impact from 1998, is more a maker of television these days, and that’s what this often resembles. The narrative structure is straightforward, linear,
unambitious and safe.
And although series such as the aforementioned The Paper Chase and LA Law have shown what good drama American law can make, here the story does eventually become bogged down in legal fine detail and the inner workings of the American Civil Liberties Union, which won’t be familiar to most Irish audiences.
Justin Theroux plays its prickly leader, Mel Wulf, and provides the first of several supporting performances that don’t altogether work and certainly don’t match the standard being set by Hammer and, particularly, Jones.
Natalie Portman was apparently linked to the role of RBG for many years but Jones definitely makes it her own, despite a screenplay (written by Ruth’s nephew) that fails to shine as much light as perhaps we would have liked on what Ginsburg is like in private.
I may not actually believe that Ginsburg once stood on a New York street in the pouring rain while delivering an impassioned eulogy to the fierce feminism of her teenage daughter, but there’s no doubt Jones delivers the big moment extremely well, just as she rises to the very different dramatic challenges posed by the climactic courtroom scenes.
The film makes much of a quote from one of Ginsburg’s Harvard professors that ‘a court ought not to be affected by the weather of the day but will be by the climate of the era’.
And it is the climate of today’s era that makes this an important film to see, partly to recognise how far the world has come, thanks to women such as Ginsburg, but how much could so easily be lost should the political and judicial climate change again. Or has that already happened?
‘Jones delivers the big moment well, and rises to the challenges of the courtroom scenes’