☆☆☆½
Compare the straightforward, sober-minded yet still playful approach that a documentary like RBG takes compared with the wild-eyed, manufactured hysteria of Dinesh D'Souza's Obama's 2016, which remains one of the top-grossing documentaries of all time.
It's worth doing, since unlike that conservative fever dream of weird reenactments, breathless, conspiratorial narration, and lack of factual material, RBG is a production of CNN, but could be accused of taking a slanted view of the country's most visible Supreme Court justice.
Slackjawed and bemused, I've watched D'Souza's films, which can be termed as documentaries only in the loosest sense -- and while this is not intended to be a denunciation of those films, it's worth examining how the extreme right-wing ideology has trouble finding even a basic narrative that can be explored with real interviews that talk about actual events.
If RBG, an inspiring though lightweight new documentary by directors Betsy West and Julie Cohen, has a fault its that it is a little too straightforward -- D'Souza made bold claims, like saying that Democrats "plan to steal America." RBG has slightly less lofty claims: at no time does it accuse "the thieves" of "wanting to own you," it merely wants to show the arc of a woman who went from being a "barely second-generation" daughter of Russian-Jewish immigrants to sitting on the most important legal panel in the country, if not the world.
The story of Bader's early life begins a theme that is never far from the narrative of RBG: This is an indefatigable woman who is inherently incapable of slowing down. It's both fun and mildly alarming to hear her own family marvel at the way that Bader Ginsburg managed to go to law school, find time to play with her young daughter and -- the real kicker -- help her husband successfully fight cancer.
And through it all, Bader Ginsburg did something both entirely mundane and thoroughly life-changing: She took a back seat to her husband, who recovered from his illness, took a job in New York -- and led her to have to change schools mid-way through achieving her law degree.
All of this is told with the traditional (but effective) tools of professional documentarians: interviews, archival footage and photographs, and memories from the subject. There are no attempts to reenact either Ginsburg's life or the conflicts of the day, no need to revise history to make it fit the narrative: RGB just tells us the story as it happened.
And it's quite a story, nicely recounted by people who knew RBG during her early years and who were close to her as she struggled to find employment just as she had struggled to be taken seriously by the all-male law schools. The "liberal bias" that exists in RBG comes in part from the slap-in-the-face shock of seeing just how deeply engrained and entirely quotidian gender bias was in the 1960s.
RBG makes no secret of the fact that RBG wanted to focus her career on gender-equality -- and that her ideology is unrepentantly liberal. The film takes it as fact that every Supreme Court justice has a personal ideology, and takes a moment to talk about how the group tries to reach consensus. It's this section of the film that feels the least fulfilling, though -- RBG is willing to show you a bit of how Ruth Bader Ginsburg herself works, but very little about how the Supreme Court operates. The closest we come is learning about the odd-couple friendship, which seemed sincere and genuine, between RBG and Antonin Scalia, but there's no deeper dive into finding out how they deal with their inherent disagreements during the critical decision-making period.
RBG is also not very much helped by its own subject. As the movie repeatedly points out, she is a quiet woman who doesn't naturally seek the spotlight, soft-spoken even if firm of opinion. Over and over, we hear how unusual it is for a person of her stature to take such a back seat -- and yet, her brilliant arguments have been enough to change the hearts and minds of people who intensely disagree with her.
It's that talent of Ginsburg's that I hoped to learn more about, and if RBG doesn't show us quite enough of that, at the very least it also doesn't resort to producing low-budget re-enactments with community-theater-level actors. Everything in RBG is designed to be a real documentary, produced by real journalists who have found a compelling -- if not entirely revelatory -- story.
It backs away from some of the toughest stuff, like finding out exactly what's on the mind of Ginsburg, who had toyed with the idea of retiring a few years ago but now seems, at least based on conventional wisdom, to have reason to stick it out as long as humanly possible. How does that make her feel? What are her thoughts on the direction that recent decisions have taken the court?
You're not going to find that in RBG. What you'll find instead is a story of a determined, resilient woman whose view of the Constitution is both shockingly simple and wonderfully direct -- she holds to her beliefs strongly, and isn't afraid to dissent, though I wish RBG had made a little bit more about what those dissents mean and why they matter so much.
Still, everything you see in the warm, uplifting, intriguing RBG is real, including the cult of personality that has grown up around her, particularly in the Trump era. She's a real woman with real foibles and, most importantly, real beliefs -- some of the most well-considered and committed beliefs of anyone in Washington. In RBG, Ruth Bader Ginsburg will inspire you with her early story and charm you with her current views. In other hands, this could have turned into an in-your-face "Notorious RBG" quasi-doc focused on her liberal dissents, but that would be the realm of other, less sophisticated filmmakers with hateful agenda to push.
At the least, RBG seems almost to have no point of view, other than giving us an in-depth glimpse into one of the century's most important legal minds. It may not be as breathless and as hysterical as it might have been (her story certainly gives it right to be), but that would have made it an entirely different documentary.
This one focuses on the facts -- yes, those pesky things. We may live in a "post-truth" world, but a movie like RBG reminds us not only that truth matters, but that truth and facts can be combined to make the kind of documentary that presents ideas, that explores humans, that tells us something good about what's happening in our world. On that level, at the very least, if you're even mildly interested in politics RBG is a documentary that shouldn't be missed.
Viewed May 13, 2018 -- AMC Burbank 8
1615
It's worth doing, since unlike that conservative fever dream of weird reenactments, breathless, conspiratorial narration, and lack of factual material, RBG is a production of CNN, but could be accused of taking a slanted view of the country's most visible Supreme Court justice.
Slackjawed and bemused, I've watched D'Souza's films, which can be termed as documentaries only in the loosest sense -- and while this is not intended to be a denunciation of those films, it's worth examining how the extreme right-wing ideology has trouble finding even a basic narrative that can be explored with real interviews that talk about actual events.
If RBG, an inspiring though lightweight new documentary by directors Betsy West and Julie Cohen, has a fault its that it is a little too straightforward -- D'Souza made bold claims, like saying that Democrats "plan to steal America." RBG has slightly less lofty claims: at no time does it accuse "the thieves" of "wanting to own you," it merely wants to show the arc of a woman who went from being a "barely second-generation" daughter of Russian-Jewish immigrants to sitting on the most important legal panel in the country, if not the world.
The story of Bader's early life begins a theme that is never far from the narrative of RBG: This is an indefatigable woman who is inherently incapable of slowing down. It's both fun and mildly alarming to hear her own family marvel at the way that Bader Ginsburg managed to go to law school, find time to play with her young daughter and -- the real kicker -- help her husband successfully fight cancer.
And through it all, Bader Ginsburg did something both entirely mundane and thoroughly life-changing: She took a back seat to her husband, who recovered from his illness, took a job in New York -- and led her to have to change schools mid-way through achieving her law degree.
All of this is told with the traditional (but effective) tools of professional documentarians: interviews, archival footage and photographs, and memories from the subject. There are no attempts to reenact either Ginsburg's life or the conflicts of the day, no need to revise history to make it fit the narrative: RGB just tells us the story as it happened.
And it's quite a story, nicely recounted by people who knew RBG during her early years and who were close to her as she struggled to find employment just as she had struggled to be taken seriously by the all-male law schools. The "liberal bias" that exists in RBG comes in part from the slap-in-the-face shock of seeing just how deeply engrained and entirely quotidian gender bias was in the 1960s.
RBG makes no secret of the fact that RBG wanted to focus her career on gender-equality -- and that her ideology is unrepentantly liberal. The film takes it as fact that every Supreme Court justice has a personal ideology, and takes a moment to talk about how the group tries to reach consensus. It's this section of the film that feels the least fulfilling, though -- RBG is willing to show you a bit of how Ruth Bader Ginsburg herself works, but very little about how the Supreme Court operates. The closest we come is learning about the odd-couple friendship, which seemed sincere and genuine, between RBG and Antonin Scalia, but there's no deeper dive into finding out how they deal with their inherent disagreements during the critical decision-making period.
RBG is also not very much helped by its own subject. As the movie repeatedly points out, she is a quiet woman who doesn't naturally seek the spotlight, soft-spoken even if firm of opinion. Over and over, we hear how unusual it is for a person of her stature to take such a back seat -- and yet, her brilliant arguments have been enough to change the hearts and minds of people who intensely disagree with her.
It's that talent of Ginsburg's that I hoped to learn more about, and if RBG doesn't show us quite enough of that, at the very least it also doesn't resort to producing low-budget re-enactments with community-theater-level actors. Everything in RBG is designed to be a real documentary, produced by real journalists who have found a compelling -- if not entirely revelatory -- story.
It backs away from some of the toughest stuff, like finding out exactly what's on the mind of Ginsburg, who had toyed with the idea of retiring a few years ago but now seems, at least based on conventional wisdom, to have reason to stick it out as long as humanly possible. How does that make her feel? What are her thoughts on the direction that recent decisions have taken the court?
You're not going to find that in RBG. What you'll find instead is a story of a determined, resilient woman whose view of the Constitution is both shockingly simple and wonderfully direct -- she holds to her beliefs strongly, and isn't afraid to dissent, though I wish RBG had made a little bit more about what those dissents mean and why they matter so much.
Still, everything you see in the warm, uplifting, intriguing RBG is real, including the cult of personality that has grown up around her, particularly in the Trump era. She's a real woman with real foibles and, most importantly, real beliefs -- some of the most well-considered and committed beliefs of anyone in Washington. In RBG, Ruth Bader Ginsburg will inspire you with her early story and charm you with her current views. In other hands, this could have turned into an in-your-face "Notorious RBG" quasi-doc focused on her liberal dissents, but that would be the realm of other, less sophisticated filmmakers with hateful agenda to push.
At the least, RBG seems almost to have no point of view, other than giving us an in-depth glimpse into one of the century's most important legal minds. It may not be as breathless and as hysterical as it might have been (her story certainly gives it right to be), but that would have made it an entirely different documentary.
This one focuses on the facts -- yes, those pesky things. We may live in a "post-truth" world, but a movie like RBG reminds us not only that truth matters, but that truth and facts can be combined to make the kind of documentary that presents ideas, that explores humans, that tells us something good about what's happening in our world. On that level, at the very least, if you're even mildly interested in politics RBG is a documentary that shouldn't be missed.
Viewed May 13, 2018 -- AMC Burbank 8
1615
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