LESS THAN POETIC JUSTICE
There’s little imagination in this steady take on the US’s revered jurist Ruth Bader Ginsburg,
For Democrats and US liberals, the 85-year-old Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the last bastion of reason standing against the moral tyranny and insanity of Trump-era radical Republicanism. As the second female justice appointed to the bench of the US’s highest judicial body, Ginsburg has made a career of fighting against sexism and for the equal rights of women. She has fought for these causes ever since she walked into a predominantly male Harvard law class in the 1950s, and through the 1970s when she argued against and helped dismantle several archaic and restrictive laws preventing the equal treatment of women in US society, before she was appointed to the court in 1993.
If you’ve seen last year’s excellent documentary RBG (a tribute to the nickname young Americans have given her — “the Notorious RBG”) you’ll know that Ginsburg is a lifelong opera devotee, workaholic and gym enthusiast, whose tiny frame holds within it a dogged devotion to the law and a fundamental belief in its protective and enfranchising powers.
Given that she is a trailblazer for women in the legal world and a steadfast upholder of their rights, it’s easy to see why RBG’s story would, on the surface, be one worth telling. The question that arises from director Mimi Leder’s adequate, if somewhat by-the-numbers biopic of Ginsburg’s pre-Supreme Court days, is what part of that story to tell — and for whom?
Played with fiery determination by Felicity Jones, Ginsburg is first introduced as a Harvard student, juggling her life as a hardworking lawyer in training who has to take on the chin interrogations from her dean as to why she is occupying a place a man could have taken at the nation’s most prestigious legal institution.
She’s also the devoted and happy wife of fellow law student Martin Ginsburg (Armie Hammer playing a suitably gentle, intelligent and doting giant) and the mother of a daughter. When Martin falls ill, Ruth takes on his classes as well as her own until she’s forced, thanks to the callous misogyny of the Harvard establishment, to complete her degree at Columbia.
Cut to the 1970s and Ruth is a professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, where she is quickly learning that there is a disjuncture between the legislative injustices she highlights in the classroom and the changes sweeping the streets in protests outside. When Martin shows her a tax case based on discrimination against male care-givers, Ruth sees an opportunity to become the lawyer she has always wanted to be, but was never given a chance to by the pompous, male-dominated establishment, and to use the opportunity to take on the bigger issue of sexual discrimination in all its guises.
What follows is a suitably crowdpleasing legal drama full of predictable frustrations, indignation and stubborn but correct choices capped with a righteous blow-them-away piece of legal oratory. Leder’s direction is steady if unimaginative, and Jones and the cast deliver their performances with enough conviction to keep things ticking along to their heroic conclusion.
It’s not that Ginsburg’s story is not worth telling, it’s just a question of whether there was perhaps a more original, less made-forTV way to tell it.
As such the film, written by Ginsburg’s nephew, is a surface, often too uncomfortably close to hagiographic appreciation of Ginsburg’s struggles that never dwells too long on any deeper considerations of character or context.
In the final verdict it’s easy enough to watch and you get the general outline of some of the early aspects of its heroine’s life, but what you won’t get is much more than a shrug from non-American audiences who are hard-pressed by the results to see why this undeniably unique woman and her fight should matter to anyone other than those born and bred in the US of A. LS
PERHAPS THERE WAS A LESS MADE-FOR-TV WAY TO TELL HER STORY