Featured Blu-ray and DVD Review: On the Basis of Sex

April 20, 2019

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On the Basis of Sex

On the Basis of Sex opened in limited release at the very end of last year, so it was clearly aiming for Oscars. That didn’t happen. However, while it wasn’t an Awards Season player, it did very well in limited release and earned nearly $25 million despite never expanding truly wide. Did the film deserve to win awards? Or is it more of a mainstream crowd-pleaser?

The Movie

The film begins in 1956 with Ruth Bader Ginsburg a student at Harvard Law Schools and is one of only nine women there. Dean Griswold makes it clear he would rather have no women there and grills her and the other freshmen women on why they are there. Fortunately, she has the fortitude to stand up for herself. Her academic career takes a further hit when her husband, Martin, is diagnosed with testicular cancer, a disease that had a 5% survival rate at the time. So not only does she have to take care of a sick husband, she takes notes for his classes, and takes her own classes. She does this and still manages to be top of her class.

This doesn’t help Ruth get a job. Every law firm turns her down, some even think she’s applying to be a secretary. In the end, she instead becomes a professor teaching Gender Discrimination and the Law, and helping to train the next generation of lawyers to make the changes she wasn’t able to. This does leave her unfulfilled and she, I don’t want to say “takes our her frustrations” on her teenage daughter, Jane, because that’s unfair. However, it does make her push Jane in a way that strains their relationship. Martin recognizes this and uses his expertise to help. He becomes an expert in tax law and shows Ruth a case where a man was denied a tax credit for hiring a nurse to take care of his mother. He was denied, because this deduction was only available to women and married or formally-married men. In shot, it’s gender discrimination, but with a male victim.

She gets some help from an older lawyer, convinces the ACLU to join the fight, and, countless montages later, Ruth and Martin get to argue their case in court.

On the Basis of Sex is a drama based on the real life story of someone overcoming the odds and it was released at the very end of the year. It practically screams Oscar-bait. However, the film is a lot more broad in its appeal. The screenplay was written by Daniel Stiepleman, who is the nephew of the real Ruth Bader Ginsburg, so it should come as no surprise that this film is a glowing endorsement of the woman and her work. It isn’t a complete hagiography though, as it does point out some of her flaws. She was a difficult mother pushing Jane in a way that didn’t always motivate her in the right direction. She was also a legendarily bad cook, which is a more humorous, and humanizing, fault to bring up. The movie is also aided by the lead performance, as Felicity Jones manages to to both humanize Ruth Bader Ginsburg and show what makes the Supreme Court Justice such an icon today. That’s an impressive feat.

On the negative side, the film is a rather typical biopic and doesn’t do enough with the genre to really stand out. That said, if you are interested in Ruth Bader Ginsburg, you will likely be very entertained by this film.

The Extras

There are three featurettes on the DVD / Blu-ray. The first of which is The Supreme Team, which is a six-minute long making-of featurette. Legacy of Justice is a three-minute look at the real-life Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Martin and Ruth: A Loving Partnership runs three minutes and is about the relationship between Ruth and Martin. That’s not a lot of extras, even for a limited release, especially one that did this well at the box office.

The Verdict

On the Basis of Sex isn’t able to escape the clichés most biopics have, but it is clearly a loving portrait of Ruth Bader Ginsburg with a winning performance by Felicity Jones. The DVD / Blu-ray don’t have a lot of extras, but it is still worth picking up.

Filed under: Video Review, On the Basis of Sex, Kathy Bates, Armie Hammer, Justin Theroux, Sam Waterston, Felicity Jones, Cailee Spaeny, Daniel Stiepleman, Ruth Bader Ginsburg