I was planning to see RBG on DVD and not in the theaters. I’m old fashioned, and I’m concerned whenever any judge publicly comments on issues that could end up in a courtroom then would have to hear demands to recuse him or herself. Let your work speak for itself. You already have power. Also while legally on the right side of the law, it was disappointing, though not surprising, to discover that Justice Ginsburg’s spirit was not when she landed on the same side as Presidon’t by calling football players who kneel in protest of extrajudicial executions “dumb and disrespectful.” She later apologized, and her work shows that she is an ally, but brunch may not be in the cards. Call me when Justice Sotomayor gets her documentary.
I changed my mind when I discovered that two women, Julie Cohen and Betsy West, directed RBG. If movies directed by women about women don’t financially do well at the box office, then I may never get my documentary on Justice Sotomayor or Justice Kagan, whom eagle-eyed viewers could spot seated behind Vice President Biden during the confirmation hearings. (Side note: New York in the SCOTUS! Whassup!) Also the day before I saw the documentary, I found it really hard to concentrate on any movie. The news has been spectacularly bleak: the suicides of Anthony Bourdain and Marco Antonio Munoz, an undocumented immigrant from Honduras separated from his family, the murder of Manuel Antonio Cano Pacheco, a deported undocumented immigrant who spent most of his life in Iowa, but was born in Mexico and had acquired DACA status, and the threat of deportation faced by Pablo Villavicencio, the pizza delivery man seized by ICE while working.
RBG is the cinematic equivalent of comfort food. You get reminded for ninety-eight minutes that not only can a woman born in the 1930s become a jurist in the highest court of the land, but she can be explicitly outspoken about her position on a variety of controversial issues and still advance in her career and personal life even if people disagree with her while simultaneously making the world a better place for everyone. Say whaaaaaaaat? I don’t even get that kind of life in the privacy of my own home. The secret ingredient: a white man secure enough in himself that he not only insists that you continue to work, but will promote you in professional circles and eventually accommodate and privilege your career over his own just as women have done for men since the beginning of time. RIP Martin D. Ginsburg. You should have taught classes on how to be a man.
The majority of RBG is chronological using archival footage, interviews with Justice Ginsburg, her family, friends and colleagues and clips from popular culture such as talk radio, Saturday Night Live and memes. I did find it jarring that the opening of the film is so excoriating, but retroactively appears marginal. Either leave it out entirely or spread it out to counterbalance the overall fan service of the film. There is nothing wrong with making a film that just adores a famous figure without criticism. The movie does explicitly note how the nation has gradually skewed right and depicts how Justice Ginsburg seems less like a moderate jurist to a liberal one even though she is the same person and as one gets older, usually one gets more conservative; however other than the opening of the film, the filmmakers seem to take for granted that we know what the world looks like around her. I think that was a mistake because RBG does make it seem as if all opposition faced by Justice Ginsburg is complimentary (Senator Orin Hatch) or downright friendly (Justice Scalia), which is fine if it was, but seems unlikely.
In contrast to a film like The Gospel According to André, the 2016 election is played for laughs and to show her irrepressible, irreverent, cheeky spirit. This deliberate tone choice tells the viewers a lot about the filmmakers and Justice Ginsburg. They are firmly on the side of the resistance, but they are unaffected by their times. It is theoretically negative, but daily life has not changed, or at least, they think that it has not. For Justice Ginsburg, this strategy has helped her escape the gravity of her times that would have held her back from advancing the rights of women on a personal and a national level. For someone like me, I relate more to Talley. It is not funny, and there is no buffer that insulates us from this blow.
RBG frequently plays audio from Justice Ginsburg’s arguments before the Supreme Court when she was an attorney. During one case, she implies in a little oppression Olympics that sexism is worse than prejudice that other minorities experience. Sexism is horrible, but all prejudice comes with a velvet glove of promise. Her life also reflects this. Perhaps she benefits from not being physically imposing, from being soft spoken, from presenting as fashionably female, from relying on her husband’s wealth accrued when he was a successful tax attorney in New York, from being a mother and grandmother. The movie shows these aspects of her life, which are not negatives, but unlike The Gospel According to André, neither Ginsburg, nor the filmmakers explicitly question why and how they chose to navigate and embrace the establishment in certain ways and revolted in others to find a path to success that suited her. This omission makes the documentary entertainment and not incisive.
Prior to watching RBG, I was unaware of Justice Ginsburg’s stamina. Like many women, she gained superpowers once she became a wife and mother and had no time to sleep. While the documentary did describe her work as an attorney, I only recall it discussing her work as a professor. When it details how she chose clients with the potential to have landmark cases, it was not clear how she was doing it. I believe that it was when she worked with the ACLU, and not a clinical program as a professor, but the documentary needed to clearly indicate and stress it. I loved that the filmmakers actually interviewed the clients, and we got to witness the real world impact of Justice Ginsburg’s work, specifically at Virginia Military Institute when a female cadet experienced the same sexist treatment that Justice Ginsburg did at Harvard Law School. Same as it ever was.
Now that SCOTUS has ended its brief flirtation with helping actual people and resumed its long standing history of helping state created people, i.e. corporations (read A People’s History of the Supreme Court by Peter H. Irons), an entertaining documentary such as RBG carries more weight than it actually delivers and is must see viewing. It is important to remember that occasionally it is possible for the law to be in the business of justice.