Ruth Bader Ginsburg Draws a Sold-Out Crowd to a New York City Screening of On the Basis of Sex
Look, it wasn’t really about the movie. Okay, maybe it was for the Academy voters, and that was the majority of the audience packed cheek to jowl at Sunday’s screening of On the Basis of Sex at the Walter Reade Theater in New York, but while the invitation may have ostensibly been to come watch the film—a biopic starring Felicity Jones, Armie Hammer, Justin Theroux, and Kathy Bates, arriving in theaters this Christmas—everyone knew that the real draw was the project’s subject, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who attended along with some of the cast, and who participated in a brief onstage interview afterwards.
“She’s not a superhero; she’s a woman like many others of her generation,” On the Basis of Sex’s director Mimi Leder said, though you could have fooled the audience, which included Gloria Steinem (wearing an RBG-inspired Lingua Franca sweater that read “all rise”) and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and which gave the 85-year-old justice a hero’s welcome (and standing ovation) at every available opportunity. She is an exceptional woman who changed the culture with her intelligence and her eloquence, Leder went on, but the themes of her story are universal: “She didn’t go into the law to become a champion for equal rights,” Leder said. “She went into the law because she thought she could do that job better than any other.”
The film, which is the second about the justice to come out this year, following the summer’s hit documentary RBG, shows Ginsburg on her path to becoming a pioneering civil rights lawyer as she attends law school—at one point attending both her husband’s Harvard law classes as well as her own, while he recovered from testicular cancer—raises her two children, and launches a law career, eventually landing as a professor at Rutgers University before finding the case that would catapult her into American history. The film’s final scenes include a cameo by the justice herself, shot in slow-motion, climbing the steps to the Supreme Court in a royal blue coat as an audio montage of some of her most famous arguments plays. “I ask no favor for my sex,” Ginsburg’s voice says as the screen goes black: “All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.”
After the end credits rolled, Justice Ginsburg, clad in a velvet blazer, whose nephew Daniel Stiepleman wrote the script, sat down with NPR’s Nina Totenberg for a Q&A in which she answered questions primarily about the film—how it felt to edit a movie script based on her life (she only made it to the third version before passing the task to her daughter, Jane), how Armie Hammer measured up to Martin Ginsburg (“I told him he was a lot taller than Marty was; he said, ‘And you’re a lot shorter than Felicity Jones.’”), and what it was like to watch a Hollywoodized sex scene inspired by her life, written by her nephew (“Marty would have loved it.”). She praised Jones’s approximation of her Brooklyn accent and spoke about the late Justice Antonin Scalia, her friend and frequent sparring partner, whose sense of humor she praised as well as his writing style, which was “much more jazzy than mine . . . he was an excellent grammarian.” After the wrenching scene of the Kavanaugh hearings, does she think that there’s any path back to the sort of bipartisan support she received when she was nominated in 1993? “All it would take was determination from senators on both sides of the aisle to begin functioning the way the Senate should function,” Ginsburg said. “I think there will be a way back. I can’t predict that I’ll see it in my lifetime, but one of the things that Marty often said about our country is that the true symbol of the United States is not the bald eagle—it’s the pendulum—and when it goes too far in one direction, it’s going to swing back.”
During our current moment, when American civil liberties feel distinctly imperiled, Ginsburg’s statuses as a staunch defender of civil rights and the oldest justice currently serving on the Supreme Court make her a distinctly vulnerable American icon; the news that the Justice had fractured three ribs in a fall last month came as a shattering blow to her fanbase, who, as Totenberg noted on Sunday night, “are offering you their ribs or anything else” she might need. Not to worry, Ginsburg said, she’s “better each week” and is back to her regular workout schedule, “even planks.” As for how much longer she’ll be on the bench? The justice answered, “I will do this job as long as I can do it full steam.”
And should her energy or vitality be in doubt, Ginsburg remains just as driven as her character was in the scenes inspired by her law school days, which she spent caring for her sick husband and 3-year-old while doing twice the schoolwork. “That accounts for how you think you can still survive on three hours of sleep?” Totenberg asked. Answered the justice: “I can.” Oh, and let the record show that the film’s climax, a court scene in which Jones’s character initially stumbles during her statement only to recover late and win over the judges during her rebuttal? There wasn’t a rebuttal—and to quote Ginsburg, she didn’t need one: “I didn’t stumble.”
