Ruth: Justice Ginsburg in Her Own Words

After one of the toughest years that many people will ever experience and with debates raging on about how much the pandemic has ruined any progress for women in the workplace, it’s still nice to spend roughly ninety minutes watching how a tiny woman from Brooklyn helped break down obstacles for us bit by bit.

"Ruth" admirably contextualizes Ginsburg's lingering legal influence, and how her writing in dissent during her 27 years as a justice often influenced subsequent opinions from lower courts.

Filmmaker Freida Lee Mock draws from photographs, video footage, and audio recordings of Ginsburg; collects interviews with mentees, colleagues, and fans; and utilizes animated sequences of courtroom proceedings to pad out this 89-minute documentary. That tactic means that the documentary is essentially stitched together by available archival material, and makes for an uneven balance.

Though filled with valuable details, the documentary has the misfortune of arriving after countless other appraisals.

There is a tendency to overly explain things as opposed to letting Ginsburg’s words flow, but if you’ve enjoyed the previous looks at the notorious RBG, this is a new one offers a different angle to her remarkable story.

It’s curiously difficult to stay engaged with Mock’s film that merely puts forth a paint-by-numbers assembly of the wealth of material it has at its disposal.