My mother rarely watches movies, and if she does, it’s always within the shelter of owning the volume control and controlling the number of people involved. But in 2018, my mother asked me to go see a movie with her. Obviously curious, I asked what it was. As it turned out, it was RBG, the documentary on the life of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who overcame insurmountable obstacles to attain her seat. Ruth Bader Ginsburg may be an unlikely hero for this generation, but for my mother, she is the symbol of a strong female. It was something we could both agree on: Ruth Bader Ginsburg is flippin’ amazing.
This pattern of my mother asking me to the movies was repeated in 2019 when my mother and I saw On the Basis of Sex, a more dramatized version featuring Felicity Jones as Ginsburg and Armie Hammer as her husband and fellow lawyer.
These were very separate experiences. RBG is a comprehensive documentary, while On the Basis of Sex is more like an origin story. RBG was simply a more satisfying experience. It glosses over her early cases but includes voiceovers of the justice eloquently taking down gender discrimination laws one by one. Every single victory is hammered in, which made me feel both proud and humbled. It was women like Ruth Bader Ginsburg who made my future what it is. The shortcomings of RBG, however, were in the cutesy moments. They take an eighty-year-old Supreme Court justice and set her lifting five-pound weights to intense rock music. It seems almost demeaning to take a legal powerhouse and put her in this kind of montage. But the importance of Ginsburg is in her image. She is the Notorious RBG, a symbol for female empowerment across generations.
On the Basis of Sex focuses mostly on Ginsburg’s struggles with her family. It’s true that taking care of a child and a husband diagnosed with cancer in his twenties, all while attending law school, was a massive feat. The film felt heavy-handed at times, though, as it shouts this message over and over again. On the one hand, there are touching and all-too-real scenes, like the one where Ginsburg and all the other women attending Harvard law are asked why they deserve a seat that could have belonged to a man. Ruth stands with a sly smile to her compatriots, and says she would like to understand her husband’s work more. And on the other end of the spectrum, an interviewer refuses to give her a job at a law firm because the wives of the male lawyers “might get jealous.”
One of the most poignant moments is when Ruth’s fifteen-year-old daughter, after being catcalled in the middle of the street, defiantly holds up a middle finger, saying, “Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?” Ruth looks on with a mixture of shock and pride. It is then that she realizes that the culture has changed, and that so too must the law.
On the Basis of Sex takes a single case—a pivotal case, but still only one—and stretches it into multiple hours. RBG manages to take dozens of brilliant cases and leave you with something in your chest that is a mixture of pride, awe, and ambition.