RBG

Julie Cohen and Betsy West direct this fawning and skin-deep documentary about octogenarian Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The film obligingly touches on but never examines the Wikipedia page bullet points of RBG’s life and work, including her childhood in Brooklyn, her education at Harvard and Columbia, her long marriage to fellow lawyer Martin D. Ginsburg, her early career as a women’s rights crusader, her 1993 appointment to the Supreme Court by President Clinton and her contemporary status as a liberal pop culture icon. We get a few humanizing glimpses of Ginsburg’s exercise routine, her devotion to opera and her extensive collection of lace collars, but she remains extremely guarded throughout, and her participation in this project feels half-hearted at best. Desperate to pad the running time to feature length, an inordinate chunk of this lightweight and unnecessary documentary is devoted to RBG memes and Kate McKinnon’s non-impression on SNL.