On the Basis of Sex (2018)

On the Basis of Sex arrives as a tidy, well-pressed biopic of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's early years, tracking her from a hostile Harvard Law School through the Moritz tax case that let her argue sex discrimination before a panel of men. The film's engine is unambiguous. It is a chronicle of a woman dismantling a century of sex-based law, and it commits to that project with a straight back and a clear eye. Mimi Leder directs with competence and warmth. Felicity Jones carries the role with a furrowed determination that the material demands.

The casting invites a raised eyebrow. A woman directs, a woman leads, and the film's sympathies sit squarely with its subject. Yet the courtroom and the faculty lounge are overwhelmingly white, and the decision to place a non-Jewish actress at the center of a Jewish life drew pointed criticism from Sarah Silverman, who filed it under a now-familiar complaint about who gets to play whom. Race, meanwhile, barely registers. The legal arguments here concern sex and nothing else, and the film treats that narrowness as focus, not omission.

Where the picture truly shows its hand is in its willingness to explain. Classroom scenes spell out the doctrine. Courtroom speeches explain the stakes to the gallery and to us. The film wants to teach, and it teaches without embarrassment. It also flatters its subject, sanding the edges into something closer to a monument than a portrait, and it takes one factual liberty in the climactic line that legal pedants have never forgiven. The history is largely honest. The sermon is delivered with a straight face. A respectable, earnest, faintly airless piece of advocacy cinema.