Witty, smart and impressive are the words that could describe the newest movie “On the Basis of Sex,” directed by Mimi Leder, starring Felicity Jones as a young Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Arnie Hammer as Martin Ginsburg. 

A winner of the Truly Moving Picture Award by Heartland Film of 2018 and a nominee for four other awards, the inspiring movie takes the audience back to when the Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg studied at Harvard and later Columbia to become a lawyer, and her early career. The plot focuses on one of Ginsburg’s first gender-equality cases, Moritz vs. Commissioner, a sex-based discrimination against a man. 

RBG is depicted as a superwoman and a hero, the best student in her law class, a mother, a wife, a tutor to her sick husband. It makes one wonder whether her days also have only 24 hours. While all doors should be open to her after graduating on top of her class, RBG cannot find employment as a lawyer in the men’s world and the America of 1960s, and accepts a position as a university professor. 

The mood of the movie changes halfway through, jumping several years forward to when the couple’s daughter Jane, played by Cailee Spaeny, is 15. Accusing her mother of not really doing anything besides teaching about inequality, Jane actively joins civil right movements and radiates all the fierce suddenly missing on the main character’s side. RBG, who handled everything life put in her way with wit this far, seems suddenly unable to argument with or soothe her own daughter, appearing powerless when it comes to family relationships.

The superwoman energy shifts from mother to daughter.

“On the Basis of Sex” is inspired by a true story and it makes one wonder which scenes truly depict the beloved RBG and which are just a romanticized fiction. The movie was making headlines throughout the world of media long before officially appearing in theaters. When the second trailer came out in the middle of July 2018, media were after Hollywood for the accuracy of the famous final line appearing in the it,where one of the judges says, “The word woman does not appear even once in the U.S. constitution” and RBG answers “Nor does the word freedom, your honor.”

It is known that the word freedom is actually stated right in the first amendment, giving Americans the freedom of speech and while the director had promised to put the dialogue in context once the scene would be seen in its full length, I did not grasp any insight while watching it as part of the whole movie. 

To build up to the point of climax, there are scenes when the otherwise-argumentative RBG appears clumsy and flubs when delivering her opening statement in front of the judges. The scene turned out not to be completely based on truth, as RBG said herself during an interview with NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg for the Academy of Achievement.

Was it really necessary to depict RBG like that? Was it supposed to suggest that she is also just a human, like the rest of us? It almost takes away a little bit of that awesomeness that the movie has built up to so far.

Knowing the marriage of the Ginsburgs to be an epic love story, Jones and Hammer faced a challenge to convince the audience about a real chemistry between them. But Jones, known for her role as Stephen Hawkins’ wife Jane Wilde from the 2014 movie “The Theory of Everything” and Hammer, appearing in the 2017 movie “Call Me by Your Name” do a great job from the beginning. 

The same cannot be said about the depicted relationship of RBG and her daughter Jane, which seems to be all business and no love, nurture or affection as expected between a mother and a daughter. It makes one wonder whether the bond was really this stiff between RBG and her daughter in real life or whether Jones just does not know how to act around teenagers.

Watching the movie from a perspective of the generation that has not had to deal with sex-based discrimination on a scale as great as RBG’s generation had to, I found the storyline educational, showing me that someone fought for a lot of what I take for granted nowadays.

By the time the closing credits rolled across the screen, I was adoring Martin Ginsburg for being the man pioneering gender equality and a supportive husband, hating the dean of Harvard Law School for his lack of progressive views, and inspired by Ruth Bader Ginsburg for helping to create the world I can live in today.

The movie does leave a deep impression. After I left the theater and went on to work as an Uber driver for the night, I wondered: would I be allowed to do this job, often seen as unfit for a young woman even today, without Ruth Bader Ginsburg?