RBG review: An enlightening and affectionate portrait of a cultural icon

Dirs: Julie Cohen, Betsy West. Featuring: Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Cert PG, 98 mins

Supreme Court associate justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is such a well-known figure in American popular culture that she is known by her initials alone. Books have been written about her and comic sketches staged in tribute to her. Her early life is dramatised in a new biopic, On the Basis of Sex, in which she is played as a young lawyer by Felicity Jones. She is also the subject of this rousing documentary portrait.

It is easy to understand why filmmakers and satirists alike are so drawn to Ginsburg. Not only is she a brilliant lawyer who “changed everything” for American women, as one interviewee here puts it. In her oversized spectacles, this diminutive, softly spoken Brooklynite is an utterly distinctive figure, both inspirational and at times a little comical. In her eighties, she still works out in the gym. Nicknamed the “notorious RBG” as if she is a rapper or superhero, she looks like a demure old lady.

Ginsburg has a ferocious work ethic but always finds time to attend the opera. She is courageous and very principled but rarely doctrinaire. Polite, quiet and reserved, she is the antithesis of the grandstanding lawyers making rousing speeches to juries seen in most legal dramas and documentaries.

One of the more surprising images in the film is the photograph of her on top of an elephant, sitting behind fellow Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia. He was an arch-conservative. She is a liberal. They may have disagreed on almost every point of law and politics but they were still firm friends.

“Law is a consuming love for me,” Ginsburg says at one point. Directors Betsy West and Julie Cohen show how hard she had to fight to establish herself in such a male-dominated profession.

When Ginsburg was at Harvard Law School, she was one of only a handful women in a student body of 500. She had a baby. Her husband, fellow lawyer Marty Ginsburg, was sick with cancer. Somehow, she looked after the child, tended her husband through his illness and still scored top marks in all her law exams. She worked on as little as two hours of sleep a night, catching up on her rest at the weekend.

Early on in the film, we hear Ginsburg characterised as a “witch”, an “evil-doer” and “an anti-American zombie”. These are the kind of misogynistic slurs that are commonplace in today’s bitterly divided, Trump-era America. Ginsburg, though, had an uncanny knack of winning the respect and affection of most of her opponents. She likens herself to a “kindergarten teacher”, patiently explaining to chauvinistic and naive judges that, yes, sex discrimination really does exist.

She made her arguments in such a precise and compelling way that she invariably won cases the media expected her to lose. When President Bill Clinton nominated her as a Supreme Court justice in the early 1990s, her appointment was confirmed by 96 votes to three. As such a tally underlines, even her opponents voted for her.

The filmmakers can find only one instance in which Ginsburg stumbled. This was when she openly attacked Trump. As a member of the Supreme Court, she was expected to stay above the fray.

RBG isn’t a critical portrait of its subject but an enlightening and affectionate one. Directors West and Cohen counterbalance the archive material with plenty of footage of young lawyers and law students today who see Ginsburg as their ultimate role model.

RBG is released in UK cinemas on 4 January