BEFORE: I've got another film with Florence Pugh on my list, but having worked out a couple months of programming in advance, it looks like I can use that film in late May to help connect the Mother's Day and Father's Day films, so I'm going to hold off on that one, re-schedule it. Instead I'll follow the other path, and have Jack Reynor carry over from "Midsommar". (Ms. Pugh is also in the "Black Widow" film, which was supposed to be released this spring, but is now scheduled for November, right around the time I was planning to run my review. How timely for me. We'll be able to go out to the movies again in November, right? RIGHT?)
You can kind of see where I was going with the schedule, right? Instead of "Midsommar", I was going to watch three films with Timothee Chalamet, with the last one being "Call Me By Your Name", with Armie Hammer, and I would have ended up here, only in more steps. Sometimes I feel like I'm definitely headed in the right direction when it seems that several different paths are all leading me to (roughly) the same place.
But I can't really think of two films that are more different, yesterday's and today's. And I'm still in a bit of a state of shock from watching "Midsommar", so I think a nice, quiet little legal film today sounds just about perfect.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "RBG" (Movie #3,276)
THE PLOT: The true story of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, her struggles for equal rights and the early cases of a historic career that led to her nomination and confirmation as a U.S. Supreme Court Justice.
AFTER: This is basically the same story that was told in the documentary "RBG", only I guess now it's a trend that every doc also seems to get turned in to a live-action film that re-creates everything with actors, because I found out that "White Boy Rick", which I watched last year, started out as a documentary called "White Boy", and I managed to watch the story of the creation of the National Lampoon magazine in the 1970's twice, once as a documentary called "Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead", and then again with actors playing all the same parts and doing most of the same things in "A Futile and Stupid Gesture". I also watched both "Apollo 11" and "First Man" in the same week last July, and they re-made that documentary about Mr. Rogers into a fiction film with Tom Hanks, so watch for versions of "American Factory", "One Child Nation", "Icarus" and "Exit Through the Gift Shop", re-made as dramas, sometime very soon.
I guess the reasoning behind this is that some people just don't watch documentaries, they need their true life stories filtered through a Hollywood screenplay, much like how I need my news delivered to me by talk-show hosts doing comedy monologues. I've been watching the real news for the past few weeks, and somehow it's just not as entertaining, I wonder why that is. I'm dreaming of the day when I can watch the news again with punchlines added. But that audience that spurns docs also needs to know what an important figure Ruth Bader Ginsburg was, and this film might be the only way those people are going to learn. She and her husband, Martin Ginsburg, worked with the ACLU to file the first gender-discrimination cases, some of which she argued in front of the Supreme Court, long before she herself was invited to be on that court as a justice.
What's interesting is that the test case was a man, who could not get a tax deduction for expenses as his elderly mother's caretaker, because the IRS would only give such a deduction to a woman, based on an outdated stereotype that only women could be caregivers. An investigation into the tax code found many statutes that discriminated by gender, and the feeling was that once there was some kind of legal precedent for gender equality, at least where the law was concerned, then other court cases could cite THAT case to challenge other laws that were discriminatory, and therefore unconsitutional.
It's also worth noting that the intent was not to radically change the world, but to force the courts to understand that the attitudes of U.S. citizens had already changed, and the laws needed to be amended to reflect that. Women had of course worked in factories during World War II, but once soldiers returned from overseas, they expected their jobs back, and many women sort of returned to raising children and staying home. By the late 1960's and early 1970's, though, women were seeking more professional jobs, such as lawyers, and the tax code, and by extension the U.S. legal system, hadn't quite caught up.
The Ginsburgs, though, were about as open-minded and forward-thinking as a couple could be. Both Ruth and Martin had gone through Harvard Law School, Ruth at a time when there were maybe nine women in a class of five hundred, and the dean was still questioning why they wanted to be there, taking a spot away from a qualified male. It's notable that the dean didn't ask each male law student why he was there, taking a spot that could have gone to someone smarter or more dedicated.
Gender bias was everywhere, it seems, and it didn't go away easily, it didn't go away overnight, and maybe in some places, it didn't go away at all. We still haven't had a female President, for example, but it's great that we've had female Supreme Court justices, and secretaries of state, and a couple of generals, both attorney- and surgeon-class. All that might have happened anyway, but it probably happened more quickly because RBG and her husband ended up with a list of all the gender discriminatory statutes and her Women's Rights Project at the ACLU started challenging them in court, one by one. Things always seem to trace back to that Fourteenth Amendment, the one that allows "equal protection under the law". It's how judges interpret that phrase "equal protection" that has affected high profile cases like Brown v. Board of Education and before that, gave women the right to vote.
This film is a little heavy-handed, sure, and it enjoys the benefit of knowing which side ended up on top of the long legal struggle, so it never wavers from displaying that one side is right and the other side is wrong, but we have to remember back to a time when this was a more complex issue and left older people scratching their heads, because it was challenging everything they thought they knew about gender roles. People who thought that women couldn't be doctors or men couldn't be nurses, or women couldn't run companies while their husbands raised their children. The film blatantly shows us Martin Ginsburg cooking for the family, to reinforce the point that they were a "modern" couple, but this is a little silly because even back then, everyone knew that men could cook, there were plenty of professional male chefs, it's just that women probably did the majority of cooking in homes.
It also seems a little coincidental that in the court case depicted, Ginsburg's opposing counsel team consists of not one, but TWO of her former professors. I kind of want to fact-check that now, to see if that really happened or it's a Hollywood dramatic trope, a fictionalization of how that case went down. But I'm guessing that they maybe fictionalized a few things, just to tell a better story - I guess it's more imporant in the end that the story gets told, rather than it gets told exactly correctly.
Also starring Felicity Jones (last seen in "A Monster Calls"), Armie Hammer (last seen in "Sorry to Bother You"), Justin Theroux (last seen in "The Spy Who Dumped Me"), Kathy Bates (last seen in "The Boss"), Sam Waterston (last seen in "Serial Mom"), Cailee Spaeny (last seen in "Pacific Rim: Uprising"), Callum Shoniker, Stephen Root (last seen in "Bombshell"), Ronald Guttman (last seen in "27 Dresses"), Chris Mulkey (last seen in "North Country"), Gary Werntz (last seen in "The Peacemaker"), Francis X. McCarthy (last seen in "Altered States"), Ben Carlson, Wendy Crewson (last seen in "Kodachrome"), John Ralston (last seen in "Stockholm"), Arthur Holden (last seen in "Long Shot"), Angela Galuppo, Arlen Aguayo-Stewart, Holly Gauthier-Frankel, Tom Irwin (last seen in "Marley & Me"), Geordie Johnson, Joe Cobden (last seen in "Born to Be Blue"), Sharon Washington (last seen in "Joker"), with a cameo from the real Ruth Bader Ginsburg (last seen in "Fahrenheit 11/9")
RATING: 6 out of 10 hip Rutgers students
No comments:
Post a Comment