RBG

RPG (2018; dirs. Julie Cohen and Betsy West) provides an admiring overview of the life and career of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.  Of particular interest is her advocacy for the rights of women as a lawyer defending cases during the 1960s and 1970s, then as a member of the US Court of Appeals, and finally as a justice on the Supreme Court.  A second stage of her career began in the 2000s as the Court shifted to the right with the appointment of conservative justices by George W. Bush.  In those years she became a strong dissenting voice on the Supreme Court.  The documentary also explores Ginsburg’s private life, especially her fifty-year marriage to her husband, Martin, who proudly supported his wife and willingly took a secondary role as her career flourished.

The documentary focuses on Ginsburg’s quiet, reticent style.  She is not a firebrand, but her quiet pursuit and defense of cases involving discrimination on the basis of sex made her one of the most effective and recognized jurists of the last 100 years.

The documentary presents Ginsburg as something of a 2-dimensional figure.  You get glimpses of her inner life, of her pleasure in her husband and family, but it would be useful to have more.  And it would be useful as well to know more about her profile as a lawyer in cases that did not involve gender rights (one would assume that there are some, at least early in her career). RBG takes the usual CNN approach to documentaries about famous figures: interviews with the subject, members of her family, her friends and associates, and photos and films of important moments in her life.  Were Ginsburg a less interesting and significant figure, such a format could prove banal.  In Ginsburg’s case, the documentary opens up and explains her life and career and accomplishments.