Review: On the Basis of Sex

On the Basis of Sex (12A)

USA 2018 120 mins  Dir: Mimi Leder  Cast: Felicity Jones, Armie Hammer, Justin Theroux, Kathy Bates, Sam Waterston, Cailee Spaeny

Biff! Take that, fusty old sexist blokes! There’s a new lawyer in town and she’s about to wipe the floor with you thanks to her brilliant legal mind, dogged perseverance and an ultra-supportive hubby who’s happy to take on domestic duties and childcare while she makes history. Yup, it’s yet another period drama for the #Time’sUp era, giving us a pioneering feminist heroine to cheer on. This is a film that does the schmaltzy, feelgood Hidden Figures thing, permitting audiences an opportunity to scoff at antediluvian treatment of high-achieving women without being made to feel uncomfortable about their own attitudes. So why did such a machine-tooled slice of awards bait drop out of the Oscar race so unceremoniously? The fact that there’s an effortlessly superior, Oscar nominated documentary on the same subject may have something to do with it.

Pay It Forward director Mimi Leder certainly gets the job done efficiently enough, hitting all the required plot points and putting The Theory of Everything‘s Felicity Jones back in an academic setting with an ailing spouse. We first meet the young Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Jones) when Leder’s camera picks out her blue dress as a solitary woman in a sea of men swarming into Harvard Law School to hear Dean Griswold (Waterston) lecture them on the privilege of being a ‘Harvard Man’. It’s the Mad Men 1950s and this is only the sixth year in which the School has admitted women. So naturally the eminently hissable Dean Griswold sees it as his duty to challenge ladies to explain why they’ve “taken a place that could go to a man”. Even more naturally, quick-witted Ruth bests him. But there’s trouble in her domestic paradise. Fellow law student hubby Marty (Hammer) – the very model of a New Man decades before the phrase was coined – has been stricken with testicular cancer. So Ruth helps out by attending his lectures as well as her own. But when she finally graduates at the top of her class, she finds that no law firm will employ her. Weaselly excuses range from the suggestion that she must be a real ball-breaker to have got so far to the assertion that as they’ve already got one woman they don’t need another one.

Suddenly it’s the 1970s. The music is better, the students are hairier, hubby appears to have recovered and the times they are a-changing. Even the couple’s now-teenage daughter Jane (Spaeny) is gripped by enthusiasm for Gloria Steinem. Little wonder poor Ruth is feeling rather left out of the revolution she hoped to drive. Then Marty brings to her attention an obscure case in which a man was denied tax relief because the law assumes that all caregivers are women. Seizing on its significance for equal rights if a precedent can be set, she sets out to persuade the Court of Appeals that her client has been discriminated against on the grounds of his gender.

Leder’s approach is certainly effective in illustrating the relentless barrage of sexism faced by the young lawyer, from patronising and dismissive brush-offs to overt and grotesque workplace discrimination. An unlikely casting choice, Brit Felicity Jones proves equally persuasive in portraying the determination and resilience with which Ginsburg powers through it as she takes on those who fear that she’s threatening the very fabric of society. Much less impressive is the often clunky script by Ginsburg’s nephew Daniel Stiepleman, which, in its final stretch, begins to feel like one of those cheesy, inspirational ‘triumph of the underdog’ yarns as our feminist superheroine joins unequal courtroom battle with three old white men who see it as their duty to defend “the natural order of things”. The real Ruth Bader Ginsburg pops up at the end to give the film her imprimatur. But if you want to know more about her life and work, you’d be better off seeking out the documentary RBG.