Movie Review: On the Basis of Sex
A drum line over a black screen. A horde of men in business suits of varying shades of gray walking purposefully in slow motion. We see tweed-covered square shoulders, briefcases held firm, short manly haircuts, and black or brown dress shoes. The men take up the entire sidewalk, street, and screen. The fight song “10,000 Men of Harvard” spells it out, in case you were confused about what was happening. Suddenly — we see a high heel clicking on the concrete. A shot of a purse, a shoulder-length head of hair bouncing along with the march. A singular female figure, wearing bright blue, refusing to be swallowed up by the greying male horde, despite standing a good few feet below them all. This is the opening sequence to On the Basis of Sex telegraphing what to expect from the rest of the film: we will be beat over the head with the imagery and dramatics of a woman fighting for her right to thrive in a man’s world.
On the Basis of Sex, directed by Mimi Leder (most known for various television shows including ER and The Leftovers, as well as the disaster movie Deep Impact), tells the story of Ruth Bader Ginsburg from her start at Harvard Law to her momentous day in court arguing the Charles Moritz tax appeal, which set the precedent for all future cases regarding sex-based discrimination. The story is a fascinating one, although if you’re only looking for a retelling of the story as it happened, you might be better served just watching the excellent documentary RBG that came out this past summer. This movie takes an already interesting and beloved figure (the notorious RBG herself), and over-dramatizes and removes any possible subtlety from her story. The movie doesn’t seem to understand that most people who will see this movie are already fans of the woman and don’t need to be tear-jerked and hammered over the head with how one-of-a-kind and game-changing she was.
The movie opens with her days at Harvard in the 1950’s, and takes every chance possible to visually remind us of her gender-based isolation: she is usually the only person wearing colors, while all the men wear grays and blacks, especially in class; when she raises her hand (with a very awkward sideways-twisted hand, for some reason, as if she’s trying to emulate the Queen’s salute), it’s placed in center screen against a mostly empty background, and the sound all but completely stops; she is constantly shown as the only woman in a sea of men that stretches to all four corners of the screen, like in the first scene with the dean’s (Sam Waterston) address, where despite the multiple female students, he refers to them exclusively as “men of Harvard.”
In this politically fraught year, people often look to figures like Ruth Bader Ginsburg for hope, especially when she remains one of the few justices that lean liberal in an increasingly conservative Supreme Court. The at times morbid concern over her mortality certainly influenced (if not directly caused) the decision to release RBG earlier this year, and to make On the Basis of Sex now. Felicity Jones, playing the notorious one herself, obviously knew how important this role was, and clearly tried to do right by her. And… boy, is she trying. A combination of nauseatingly corny lines and way over-the-top acting make for a performance that almost caricatures the woman. In all fairness to Jones, no actress alive could play lines like “‘You did it.’ ‘No. We did it.’” without inducing several hundred simultaneous eye rolls. Even ignoring the exceedingly sentimental dialogue, and Jones’ truly off-putting attempt at a Brooklyn accent and affected way of speaking, her odd and overly dramatic performance choices (bolstered by the overly dramatic directing and music choices) make for a glaringly emotionally manipulative film that ends up achieving the exact opposite than it intends. She uses a lot of awkward hand gesturing (like doing some sort of unmusical jazz hand when telling her husband, played contrastingly casually by Armie Hammer, that the caregiver tax break law is “sex-based discrimination… against…a man”), and constantly seems to be acting for an invisible audience she has to cheat out to (in a confrontation between RBG and her daughter Jane, played by Cailee Spaeny, instead of actually facing her, Jones chooses to jut her shoulder forward so her body is partly twisted away from Spaeny, giving the impression she’s about to deliver a monologue for her acting school audition, rather than having an argument with her daughter).
As stated previously, however, not all the responsibility can be placed on Jones. Leder’s heavy-handed directing of Daniel Stiepleman’s (RBG’s actual nephew) equally unsubtle script leaves several scenes that seem like they would be more at home in a telenovela, such as a scene where RBG and Jane are catcalled by some construction workers and Jane, with all the spunk of a teenage hippie in the 70’s, calls them out with some truly weak insults then says to her stunned mother “you can’t let boys talk to you that way,” after which RBG stands in the pouring rain (despite them standing right next to an open-doored taxi they literally just hailed) to tell her how proud she is of how truly amazing Jane has become. Scenes like that one in the rain, or an early scene where RBG lies down in her husband’s hospital bed, cradles his crying face in her proportionally tiny hands, and promises they will spend their lives together no matter what, will elicit more annoyance from an audience than the tears they’re so obviously reaching for.
This is not to say that the movie is completely ineffective. The climax and high point, wherein RBG finds her stride in the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, after floundering in front of the judges for twenty minutes, is nothing short of triumphant. It’s extremely satisfying to watch a woman who has gone through everything the movie has (perhaps ham-handedly) shown us finally get her moment to shine, and completely school all the men in the courtroom.
On the Basis of Sex takes a figure that has been quasi-sanctified in these turbulent times and delivers a mostly well-acted, mostly well directed, extremely biasedly written film that is… honestly fine. It’s not a disgrace to the real woman, it’s not quite as good as the documentary to which it will have the misfortune of constantly being compared (since they came out within a few months of each other), but it’s a perfectly decent attempt at depicting a real-life hero for many.
