Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
Director: Mimi Leder, Foxtel.
On the Basis of Sex is compelling viewing. It’s a 2018 American biographical legal drama based on the life and early cases of the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who served as an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1993 to her death in 2020. She became the second woman to serve on the Supreme Court.
It also tells of the wonderfully supportive marriage to the late tax attorney, Martin Ginsburg (Armie Hammer, The Social Network, Call Me by Your Name) and the one case they argued together, a landmark in outlawing discrimination ‘on the basis of sex’.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg (played brilliantly by Felicity Jones, The Theory of Everything, Like Crazy) was the pioneer litigator who argued cases that were as important to women’s rights as Brown v. Board of Education was to the rights of racial minorities.
Ruth and Martin were still in law school and the parents of a toddler when Martin became ill with testicular cancer. Ruth attended all of his classes, as well as her own, and helped him to complete his course work.
She met with Dean Erwin Griswold (Sam Waterston, The Killing Fields, The Great Gatsby) to ask if he would allow her the same opportunity he had given male students to finish her last year elsewhere and still get a Harvard degree. He refused. After she graduated first in her class from Columbia, no law firm wanted to hire a woman. She then put aside her dreams of advocacy and took a job as a professor at Rutgers Law School, teaching ‘Sex Discrimination and the Law’.
Ruth had wanted to fight for change – and she gets a chance to do just that after Martin finds a tax case that gives her that opportunity in 1970. The tax law did not allow a deduction for the expenses of an unmarried male caregiver — only a female.
The case involved Charles Moritz (Chris Mulkey), who had to hire a nurse to help him care for his ageing mother so he could continue to work. However, Moritz was denied a tax deduction for the nursing care because Section 214 of the Internal Revenue Code at the time specifically limited the deduction to “a woman, a widower or divorcée, or a husband whose wife is incapacitated or institutionalized”.
Instead of amending the rule, the government decided to fight. They underestimated Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Ruth simply asked for the law to keep up with societal changes that had already taken place. To a judge’s objection that the Constitution does not contain the word “woman”, she responds vigorously that neither does it contain the word “freedom”.
The film’s script is written with great affection by Justice Ginsburg’s nephew, Daniel Stiepleman. Director Mimi Leder has an eye for telling detail and a sure sense of pacing. Jones and Hammer make an appealing couple, with strong support from such actors as Kathy Bates, who plays pioneering feminist attorney Dorothy Kenyon, and Justin Theroux as Mel Wulf, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union.
