Butler's Cinema Scene

Felicity Jones as Ruth Bader Ginsberg

“ON THE BASIS OF SEX” My rating: B

120 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

“RBG,” last year’s documentary about Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, was so encyclopedic and emotionally engaging that at first flush a fiction film based on the same material seems superfluous.

Of course, “RBG” didn’t feature an eager and mildly acrobatic bedroom encounter between the young Ruth and her husband Marty. So there’s that.

Directed by Mimi Leder, “On the Basis of Sex” concentrates on the early years of Ginsberg’s legal career and culminates with her arguing a landmark legal case that forced the government to end discrimination based on sex.

If the film follows a predictable David-vs-Goliath path, it is nevertheless informative, accurate (RBG has given it her stamp of approval) and inspiring.

And it succeeds in making its heroine wildly appealing not for her looks or her ability to elicit warm fuzzies but because of her towering intellect and fierce determination. A different kind of leading lady, indeed.

We join Ruth Bader Ginsberg (Felicity Jones) at the 1956 orientation session for Harvard Law School.  She’s one of only nine women in a class of 500; at a special luncheon for the ladies, the dean (Sam Waterston) asks each woman to explain why she deserves a slot that could have gone to a man.

Ooookay, then.

Ruth is clearly p.o.-ed by the numerous displays of chauvinism she encounters, but her style is to buckle down and beat the guys at their own game.  Which she does on a regular basis.

She’s supported in all this by her husband, Marty (Armie Hammer), on his way to becoming a wildly successful tax lawyer but more than happy to be the family’s cook and primary childcare provider while the Missus buckles down with the books.  Not only is Marty a good-natured saint, he looks (in this film, anyway) exactly like Armie Hammer.  The whole package. Which makes his early diagnosis of testicular cancer even more unsettling.

Like the documentary “RBG,” this film alternates between two aspects of its subject’s life. There’s the Ginsbergs’ personal story — by most accounts Marty and Ruth had one of the century’s great marriages. But not all is copacetic. Ruth is excoriated by her teenage daughter as “a bully…and she wants everyone to know how smart she is.”

Armie Hammer, Felicity Jones

Failing to land a gig in the private sector (“A woman, a mother and a Jew to boot,” marvels one law firm job interviewer. “I’m surprised they even let  you through the door.”), Ruth becomes a law professor at Rutgers University where she has the freedom to pursue cases that interest her.

She very quickly determined that women are getting the short end of the legal stick. At the time many laws prevented women from working overtime. Women could be fired for getting married. A woman’s Social Security benefits could not pass to her family after her death. Female cops couldn’t patrol the streets of New York City. Married women could only get  credit cards in their husband’s names.

The remedy to all this, the master key that would unlock everything, comes to Marty in the form of a tax case.

Charles Mortiz was denied a tax deduction for the money spent on his invalid mother’s care. On appeal, the tax court agreed with the government that the deduction was unavailable because Moritz was a single man who had never married; the law applied only to a woman, a widower or a divorced person.

At stake was $296 in taxes.  But as a reluctant ACLU lawyer (Justin Theroux) notes, “This is the opening salvo on a 50-year war for a new class of civil rights.”

Indeed, if Ruth and Marty (with, eventually, the support of the ACLU) can prove that the law unconstitutionally discriminates against a man, they will force a re-evaluation of all  laws that treat the sexes differently.

Which would be a huge win for women.

There are lots of legal machinations on display in “On the Basis of Sex”; thankfully,  Daniel Stiepleman’s screenplay does a clever job of explaining them in ways even the least court-savvy of viewers can understand.

The upshot is a well-acted and largely satisfying film that tells us a lot about modern legal history in an easily digested form. What’s really astounding is that it wasn’t until the early 1970s that we saw the dismantling of patently paternalistic laws which today seem utterly Neanderthal.

| Robert W. Butler