FILM: On The Basis Of Sex

Not one but two films this year illustrate what a fascinating and dramatic life Ruth Bader Ginsberg has lived. In June, we loved RBG the documentary, but last night we really enjoyed On The Basis Of Sex, a dramatization of formative episodes in her early years. The film begins with a great shot of a sea of young white men in dark suits striding into Harvard Law School, and then amidst them, one woman in a blue dress. We get to see young Ruth in law school, and what it was like being one of a handful of women in one of the first years women were admitted at all. Including a scene where the dean of the law school asks her to explain why she chose to go to law school and take up a spot that could have been given to a man! We heard some of these same stories in the documentary, but it’s something else to see them dramatized. We see her own experiences of sex discrimination challenges and indignities in her own early job search, her being a law professor at Rutgers teaching progressive young students in the 1960s, and then her first case with the ACLU that was the genesis of her later amazing career in a string of cases challenging gender discrimination. But the heart of the film is the whole family dimension, the amazing way that she and her husband Marty supported each other, and their relationship with their growing daughter and son, for whom Ruth and Marty wanted to set a great example as well as make a better world. While the climax is a dramatic courtroom procedural, strong in its own right, it gains even more emotional heft from the family and love story behind it.