Monday, January 14, 2019

On the Basis of Sex (The Movie)


On the Basis of Sex is a dramatization of the life and early career of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (played by Felicity Jones). It starts in 1956 with Ginsburg as a first-year student at Harvard Law School. When her husband Martin, a second-year student, falls ill, Ruth attends both her classes and his, takes notes and transcribes lectures, while caring for both Martin and their infant daughter. Martin recovers and becomes a successful tax lawyer in New York, while Ruth transfers to Columbia to take care of her family while finishing law school. Those who know her story (or who saw the documentary RBG) already know how important her family has been for her and what a successful relationship she had with her husband, all of which this film does a good job keeping in focus.

She graduates at the top of her class, but is unable to find a job at a law firm because none are willing to hire a woman. Instead, she takes a job as a professor at Rutgers Law School, and teaches "The Law And Sex Discrimination." In 1970, Martin brings a tax law case to Ruth's attention - the case of a Denver man denied a caregiver tax deduction because Section 214 of the Internal Revenue Code limited that deduction to "a woman, a widower or divorce, or a husband whose wife is incapacitated or institutionalized." Ruth sees this case as an opportunity to challenge laws that assume that men will work to provide for their families, and that women will stay home to care for their husbands and children. Most of the movie is taken up with her preparation for this case and her Argument at the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals.

As the film ends we learn that the appellate court found unanimously in her client's favor, that she went on to co-found the Women's Rights Project at the ACLU, and in 1993 became an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, confirmed almost unanimously (something almost inconceivable today). The final scene shows the actual Justice Ginsburg walking up the steps of the Supreme Court building.

Although the oral argument scenes attempt to create some suspense, we know the outcome, and so there really is no suspense. The film focuses our attention on her determination and persistence (against seemingly incontrovertible odds) to bring the Law in step with the rapidly changing character of gender relations in contemporary society. It does so while effectively portraying Justice-to-be Ginsburg's actual real-life circumstances and family challenges, which themselves mirrored that changing society.

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