On the Basis of Sex

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was one of the very few women admitted to the faculty of law at Harvard in the late fifties. She also graduated from Columbia, when she was already the mother and wife of Martin D. Ginsburg, destined to become an important tax lawyer. At the end of his school career, however, in the New York of the thousand law firms, he struggled to find work, as a woman in a world of men, and later struggled with more unique than rare determination in many processes for discrimination based on gender.

In the 1970s, again, in the country of the democratic dream and the protests against the war in Vietnam, this kind of discrimination was still perfectly legal, and concerned about one hundred and fifty laws of the constitutional charter.
Of course Ginsburg was not the first person to attempt to remedy this state of affairs, but it was she who turned out to be the right person at the right time. Let it be called “ésprit du temps”, referring to the change in collective practices and representations and to the birth and flowering of an individual search for self-realization, or to define it, as in the film, “the weather of the era”, not there is no doubt that institutions are often seriously lagging behind social and cultural practice and there are moments in history where this gap cries out for vengeance. There is no doubt, either, that A just cause voluntarily enters into dialogue with the present time, in which on the political agenda of the western states figure, for example, the issue of equal pay for men and women, and in which the Reactive parties call into question a series of rights that seemed to be acquired once and for all.
The biopic’s screenplay on Bader Ginsburg is signed by his nephew, Daniel Stiepleman, and tells the first occasion on which the future Supreme Court judge, still a beginner, saw a ploy that, by defending the right of a male, could have so that American justice shines the spotlight on too many laws that penalized women. The idea is brilliant, but it is a pity that neither Mimi Leder’s, rather flat, nor the insipid interpretation of Felicity Jones, dignified and nothing more, is the same either. The traditional packaging of the film, that is, does not match the revolutionary nature of the person and the work of Ginburg, with the result that the cinematographic representation of the character is less fascinating than the reality of the same.

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