A New Ruth Bader Ginsburg Documentary Finds Its Heart in Love, Not Law
The Ruth Bader Ginsburg documentary, RBG, directed by Betsy West and Julie Cohen, is probably not what you think it is, or even what, given the partisan hoopla in which we attempt to live our lives, you’d be forgiven for thinking it might be: a fawning polemic detailing a liberal justice battling the court’s right wing. There is fawning, though a fair amount is done by conservatives, including soon-to-retire Republican Senator Orrin Hatch and Antonin Scalia, the conservative justice and, until his death in 2016, the BFF of RBG. But the film is a deftly crafted portrait of a refreshingly wildly mild-mannered legal mind who was a powerful force in American life long before she donned the black robes and her trademark collars (one for dissenting opinions, one when she is siding with the majority, a fashion touch she developed with her female justice predecessor, Sandra Day O’Connor). What’s surprising to a casual follower of the judicial branch is that you’ll be reaching not for your legal pad while watching the film, but the tissues, given that what actually underpins RBG is a love story.
The opening credits, by the way, are genius, a brilliant gimmick in a time when documentaries are decorating themselves with more dumb gimmicks all the time. I won’t spoil the visuals, but we hear what I’ll call disembodied male Beltway voices chiding the second female justice appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court in her absence, the way male voices are wont to do. “This witch! This evildoer! This monster!” rants one. ”She’s one of the most vile human beings—she’s wicked,” says another. Says a voice that sounds a lot like the current head of the executive branch: “She has no respect for the traditions of our constitution, none.” Like Donald Trump, Ginsburg is a native New Yorker, and the story begins with “Kiki” Bader, a young girl in Brooklyn who is the child of Eastern European immigrants and likes to climb roofs with the boys. Even back then, her high school friends knew her as a deep thinker. “You knew she was listening,” says one, interviewed for the film. “She didn’t do small talk,” says another.
Ginsburg’s mother is portrayed as strict and loving, dying the night her daughter was about to graduate high school, after all but hiding a horrible cancer and instilling in her daughter the mantra that she cites over and over in the film: “Don’t allow yourself to be overcome by useless emotions like anger.” At Cornell, during the anti-Communist trials staged by Senator Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn (a mentor to the current POTUS), Ginsburg recognized the advantages of using the law to change the world for the better, and ended up being one of nine women at Harvard Law, where, at a dinner, the dean asked each to explain why they were taking the seat that could have been taken by a man. When she graduated, none of the major firms in New York City would hire a woman, and she took a job teaching. At Rutgers, she began to carefully choose cases as the women’s movement is taking to the streets—one of the first being Frontiero v. Richardson, involving Air Force Lieutenant Sharron Frontiero, who was denied benefits for her husband on the basis of gender. When Ginsburg approached the Supreme Court justices for the first time, in 1973, they were treated to her systematic analysis of the ways in which the legal system kept women down, through thousands of state and local laws. “Men and women are persons of equal dignity, and they should count equally before the law,” she would later say. She would go on to win five of the six cases she argued at the Supreme Court, as a cofounder of the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project.
Looking back, her colleagues are amazed at how her opponents were so unprepared to deal with her genius and preparation. Less amazing is that the justices could be jerks. “And so, Mrs. Ginsburg, you won’t be satisfied with Susan B. Anthony’s face on the new dollar?” former Chief Justice William Rehnquist joked. Asked by one of the filmmakers how she responded to snide and sexist remarks, she pauses, as she so often does. “Never with anger, as my mother taught me, that would have been self-defeating—always as an opportunity to teach,” she says. (The mantra appeared to haunt her after she called Trump “a faker.”) “I did see myself as a kind of kindergarten teacher in those days, because the judges didn’t think sex discrimination existed. Well, one of the things I tried to plant in their mind at that point was: Think about how you would like the world to be for your daughters and granddaughters.” She was making what was, sadly, a radical case, but proceeding in a technically conservative manner, her m.o. to this day. She was not only not a rabble-rouser but in meetings, she rarely spoke. “Marching and demonstrations just weren’t her thing,” says a colleague.
Nor was cooking. “I still can’t eat swordfish to this day after what she did to it,” says her now adult son. She was nonetheless working out a new domestic paradigm at home, or something that looked new in contrast to what was expected in the 1960s, one that started with what the film portrays as a beautiful partnership. “He was the first boy that I ever met who cared that I had a brain,” Ginsburg says. “Most guys in the ’50s didn’t.” Ginsburg argues that she survived the intense scrutiny of being one of nine women at Harvard Law, because of her family—her husband, who encouraged her, and her 14-month-old child whose existence encouraged her to organize her time. “She gave me perspective and she kept me sane,” he says. Then, more complications arose. In his third year of law school, Marty Ginsburg was diagnosed with a rare testicular cancer, and Ruth collected notes from his classmates and spent her evenings typing them up for him before getting to her own work (he later credited his recovery “in part to his wife’s ability to juggle caring for him, their young daughter, and their dual legal studies,” according to CNN). “It’s when she learned to burn the candle at both ends,” says Nina Totenberg, the NPR legal reporter. The film skips over the couple’s pre–law school time in Oklahoma, when Marty was stationed at Fort Sill, but it was while working for the Social Security Administration that the 21-year-old Ginsburg was demoted for being pregnant.
She was appointed to the federal judiciary by Jimmy Carter, who made numerous appointments of women and people of color. By the time Justice Byron White announced his retirement, in the first term of President Bill Clinton, while Clinton initially wanted Governor Mario Cuomo, he was persuaded by Marty’s all-out campaign. “I can’t think of anyone less likely to tout her own horn than Ruth, so Marty had to play the New York Philharmonic,” says a friend.
The interviews with the children are hilarious and heartwarming (has the word exigent ever before been used to compliment a mom?), and the film goes a long way to consider a question that The New York Times, back in 1993, said people had been asking since her appointment to the court: “. . . whether she is steely or just cold, a passionate fighter or a dry proceduralist, aloof or simply shy.” The question itself can be sexist, given that “aloof,” “steely,” and “cold” can be compliments for a man, though when I spoke with the directors, they reminded me that at the time, displays of emotion would have hurt her (sadly, not unlike now). “She had made a very conscious effort to be taken seriously in a culture of men,” said Cohen.
Missing is more of an idea of how the judge sees the future, or her role on a court that saw her as a left-leaning moderate when she arrived and now, as people contemplate her leaving, off with Sonia Sotomayor in a lonely liberal wilderness. The 85-year-old’s kickass workout routine would indicate that she will be around for a while, but we are left to wonder how she sees her dissents: as screams in a legal landscape in which corporate personhood continues to be increased (see Citizens United v. FEC) while, for instance, the Voting Rights Act is decimated? Or are they designed to mark a legal trail back to a place more hospitable to a greater justice? (For more on this idea, see the eminent legal scholar Linda Greenhouse in The New York Times last month.) I asked the directors about this, too. “I think Justice Ginsburg takes the long view,” says West. “She’s optimistic.” Watching RBG, you certainly get the feeling that the justice knows exactly what she’s doing—still working till 3:00 and 4:00 in the morning, her husband no longer around to tell her to sleep. The only time she appears to take off is for the opera, where she claims to see everything that’s in the law—justice, beauty, the turmoil on which our lives attempt to stay afloat—played out on the stage. “I’m overwhelmed by the beauty of the music, the drama—and the sound of the human voice. It’s like an electrical current.” We are fortunate as a body politic that this judge is as in love with procedure as she is with the world.
