On the Basis of Sex: Thin gruel

On the Basis of Sex (2018) • View trailer 
Three stars. Rated PG-13, and much too harshly, for fleeting profanity and suggestive content
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.18.19

2018 was quite the year for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, subject of both an award-winning documentary (RBG), and a dramatized depiction of the early years that led to her first significant gender discrimination victory.

Young Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Felicity Jones), eager to impress during the initial session
of her first class at Harvard Law School, quickly discovers that her almost entirely male
classmates regard her with — at best — patronizing amusement.

The latter arrived during the holiday rush: just in time for Oscar consideration. Unfortunately, director Mimi Leder’s On the Basis of Sex isn’t likely to earn any accolades, despite the significance of its subject. First-time scripter Daniel Stiepleman’s narrative is too bland, and star Felicity Jones — although an excellent physical choice for the role — rarely gets a handle on Ginsburg’s essential passion and dignity.

This film is too ordinary and “safe.” That shouldn’t come as a surprise, given that Steipleman is Ginsburg’s nephew; he clearly took a respectful, strawberry-lensed approach that stops just short of canonizing his aunt. (She deserves it, but still…) 

Steipleman also fails to balance his dual focus: both the formative years of Ginsburg’s career, and the sexist barriers that would have thwarted anyone less determined; and the warm mutual devotion shared with husband Martin, her staunchest advocate and — as a highly skilled tax lawyer and litigator himself — a key collaborator. Unfortunately, we get a far better sense of the Ginsburgs’ quieter, intimate moments — Jones and co-star Armie Hammer (as Martin) are quite sweet together — than of Ruth’s legal acumen.

By the time we hit the second-act squabbling between Ruth and rebellious teenage daughter Jane (Cailee Spaeny), the film threatens to devolve into a stereotypical, TV-style family melodrama: definitely not the proper tone for this particular story.

Which is a shame. At other moments, we get tantalizing glimpses of a much stronger and more dynamic film, particularly when feisty Kathy Bates is on screen, as renowned feminist and ACLU co-founder Dorothy Kenyon.

And to be fair, Leder and Stiepleman build to a terrific climax, as Jones’ nervous Ruth prepares to deliver her first courtroom argument in November 1972, before the three judges on the U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. This episode is milked for maximum dramatic impact, and it’s one of the few times that Jones displays the appropriate level of resolve, grit and forthright sincerity.

But that’s getting way ahead of things. We begin in the fall of 1956, as Ruth becomes one of only nine women to enroll alongside roughly 500 men at Harvard Law School. Several economical scenes deftly sketch the devotion shared between Ruth and Martin, and the love that both shower on their toddler daughter Jane.

Dean Erwin Griswold (Sam Waterston) and his wife host a formal dinner party, ostensibly as a means of introducing these nine women to the Harvard fold. But the gathering’s benign atmosphere is shattered when Griswold bluntly demands that each guest stand and justify “why you are at Harvard, taking the place of a man.”

Thus the battle lines are drawn.

It’s a great set-up, but there’s no payoff. We swiftly skate past the likely fallout from Griswold’s insufferable behavior, gaining only a single glimpse of Ruth strutting her thoroughly researched legal knowledge in a classroom headed by a professor (Stephen Root) who attempts to ignore her raised hand, until he can’t. We depart that scene assuming that she has earned some grudging respect — given Root’s thin smile — but later events suggest otherwise. Which is a problem of ambiguity.

Subsequent classroom escapades are ignored in favor of the discovery that Martin has testicular cancer, which a doctor advises has “only a five percent” chance of survival. Cue the inevitable poignant close-up on Jones and Hammer — “We’ll beat this,” she insists — and whoosh, we flash-forward two years. Martin has recovered miraculously, and accepted a job in New York City; Ruth petitions Griswold to grant her a Harvard Law degree, despite her third-year transfer to Columbia Law School, in order to be with her family. (He refuses. Of course.)

So much for Ruth’s influential two years at Harvard, of which we get nosense.

Columbia also warrants no more than a fleeting mention, although Stiepleman does include one of Ruth’s many unsuccessful, post-graduation job interviews. It’s a thoroughly infuriating scene — as is intended — because apparently it wasn’t enough that she tied for first in her class at Columbia, and became the first person to be a member of both the Harvard and Columbia Law Reviews. 

(As Ginsburg later explained, during a Harvard alumnae reunion in 1993, “I was Jewish, a woman and a mother. The first raised one eyebrow; the second, two; the third made me indubitably inadmissible.”)

Academia proves the only recourse, so Ruth accepts a job as a Rutgers Law School professor. We blast forward again to 1970, where Stiepleman finally settles into a reasonable narrative timeline; the cast expands to include Bates’ Dorothy Kenyon, ACLU colleague Melvin Wulf (Justin Theroux) and — as already mentioned — teenage Jane, now an activist spitfire.

Ruth is getting nowhere, even with fellow advocates such as Wulf in her corner. Theroux’s role is intriguing, because this is a point in Wulf’s career that has left him wary; his sympathy and assistance come with too many strings attached, putting him squarely in the “with friends like these, who needs enemies?” category. 

We can’t decide whether to like or loathe Mel, and that’s the beauty of Theroux’s performance; he manages to have it both ways.

Then comes the heaven-sent moment, when Martin wanders into Ruth’s office and hands her a tantalizing court case. “I don’t read tax cases,” she sniffs, but Martin perseveres (a scene played perfectly by Hammer).

This eventually blossoms into Moritz v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, as deliciously clever a sideways means of attacking gender discrimination, as the income tax evasion conviction that sent Al Capone to federal prison in 1931.

At which point, Leder’s film finally (finally!) builds some suspenseful momentum. Because even this case is far from a clear road to courtroom victory.

Stiepleman was drawn to it because this was the only case that Ruth and Martin argued together, during their respectively long careers. The dynamic between Jones and Hammer gets even more intense during the third act, as they prepare for what they know could establish a tremendously important precedent (and which Wulf fears could set gender discrimination efforts back a decade, should it go wrong).

Chris Mulkey is nicely understated as Charles Moritz, the 63-year-old bachelor who feels that he deserves a tax deduction for the money paid a caregiver who looks after his 89-year-old mother: a deduction that the tax code specifies can be granted only to a single woman. Mulkey delivers just the right blend of pride, embarrassment, quiet decency and — eventually, reluctantly — hope.

Mychael Danna’s orchestral score is mostly understated, with gentle atmospheric touches appropriate to the story’s frequent moments of disappointment, distress and setback. But he cheekily opens the film — backing the smartly dressed Ruth’s strut into Harvard for the first time, all but lost in a sea of men — with a boldly triumphant, “Pomp and Circumstance”-style march: an intentionally ironic counterpoint to the entrenched sexist obstacles she’s about to face.

Leder concludes her film with a symbolic scene, as Jones reverentially mounts the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court, anticipating the decisive battles ahead. The camera is placed such that she disappears briefly behind a pillar, and then the actual Ruth Bader Ginsburg takes her place for the final few steps into the building. It’s a telling moment that radiates far more drama and dignity, in a few scant seconds, than most of the rest of the film.

The (mostly female) audience with whom I saw On the Basis of Sex applauded generously as the end credits rolled … but I couldn’t help feeling that they were honoring Ginsburg herself, rather than this underwhelming film.