Politico Editor Laments Lack of Men in Movie About Ruth Bader Ginsburg's Life

But let’s turn away from politics. The essay goes on to pan “On the Basis of Sex”—a movie about gender discrimination—by complaining it didn’t give enough screen time to her husband Martin, played by Armie Hammer. Canellos uses the word “extraordinary” once in the piece, and I’ll let you guess for yourself whether it modifies a man who “enjoyed cooking and parenting,” or a woman born in the 1930s who rose to the Supreme Court.

And he can’t exactly let Ruth have that, either! “Marty shrewdly campaigned for her Supreme Court nomination at a time when others felt that, at 60, she was too old for the appointment,” he writes. Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s own personal history as a barrier-breaking civil rights lawyer and 13 years on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, on the other hand, apparently had very little to do with her nomination.

There is also the incredible complaint that the film should have focused more on the all-male panel of 10th Circuit judges who were even open to Ginsburg’s persuasion that gender discrimination is bad. Canellos writes:

There’s a further irony to the emergence of RBG as a political icon: She would never have succeeded in rooting out some of the double standards in American law had she not argued before some fair-minded, apolitical judges. In “On the Basis of Sex,” the male professors, law-firm partners and Justice Department attorneys are all irredeemably sexist and connive to preserve their privileges; the male federal judges, however, are not and do not. Though they’re lower-court judges, they’re portrayed by character actors resembling Earl Warren and William Brennan and other Republican appointees who turned out to be attuned to social change. When, at an appeals-court hearing, Ginsburg launches into a speech about the evils of sexism, the camera pans over their thoughtfully creased faces, absorbing her words like kindly grandfathers, while oboe music reminiscent of Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” plays on the soundtrack. The judges are so clearly moved by Ginsburg’s arguments that her team is tearful with joy even before they issue their ruling.