The real RBG

Ruth Bader Ginsburg is too ill to sit on the Supreme Court. When she saw On the Basis of Sex, a hagiography written by her nephew, she must have thought she had already gone to heaven. Directed by Mimi Leder to the highest TV-movie standards, this prequel to the obsequious 2018 documentary RBG will appeal to all purchasers of the grovelling 2015 biography, Notorious RBG.

The real RBG totters across the last frames of this movie like the laminated ghost of American liberalism. Such idolatry diminishes Bader Ginsburg’s achievement, the unpicking in 1971 of the first of 178 laws discriminating against you-know-who on the basis of you-know-what. But this film crackles with nylon, self-regard, and unearned privilege.

It’s the 1950s. Ruth and Marty are top students at Harvard Law, and newlyweds with a baby daughter. One night, Marty collapses during an Elvis impersonation and is diagnosed with testicular cancer. When Marty loses a ball, Ruth saves his career by attending his lectures as well as hers. But when Marty lands a job in New York City, he wears the trousers. The law is for men, and Ruth is ‘a woman, a mother, and a Jew to boot’. Marty becomes that fiscal oxymoron, a hot tax lawyer. Ruth sinks to a mere professorship.

Yes, it’s now the 1960s. Ruth (the remorselessly perky Felicity Jones) has an epiphany at an anti-Vietnam protest. And another when her teenage daughter confronts a sexist construction worker. And another when she realises that Brown vs Board of Education, the 1954 ruling that desegregated American schools, might be extended to sexual discrimination.

The 14th Amendment makes all Americans equal under the law, and is a powerful legal instrument when invoked without laughter. Ruth consults Dorothy Kenyon (Kathy Bates), a bag lady who used to be a feminist lawyer, and Mel Wulf (Justin Theroux), a corduroy-clad comedian from the ACLU.