Betsy West makes patient work absorbing, especially in partnership with Julie Cohen. We recommend RBG for its clarity and warmth, though its readiness to accept another compliment leaves us wishing for a harder question.
Fi1m perspective
In RBG (2018), Ruth Bader Ginsburg is given room to speak, and the work that made her a public figure is explained without fuss. Betsy West and Julie Cohen keep their attention on the patient effort behind that reputation. It makes their portrait an engaging introduction. The difficulty comes when they seem to decide that admiration is answer enough.
West came to documentary features after producing and overseeing network news, and that background helps explain her emphasis on making a complicated subject comprehensible. Before her directing debut with RBG, she executive-produced the series MAKERS: Women Who Make America (2012–2014). With Cohen, she went on to co-direct My Name Is Pauli Murray (2021) and Julia (2021), a portrait of Julia Child. The subjects change, but the attention to women's achievements continues.
Getting Ginsburg to participate took persistence. West and Cohen secured sustained access for RBG, which combines archival material, interviews and present-day observation. West has also built a recurring team, including cinematographer Claudia Raschke and editor Carla Gutierrez. In RBG, those different sources make the patient work accessible and leave Ginsburg space to speak. That is a producer's achievement as well as a director's, even if it is difficult to separate West's contribution from Cohen's.
Our reservation concerns what happens once that access has been won. We grew frustrated when RBG accepted another expression of approval without asking the next question, because West and Cohen had made us interested enough to want more. Their affection supplies much of the film's warmth, and we would not want it replaced with dutiful suspicion. A little more questioning would have made the portrait stronger. Start with RBG, and leave room for a less admiring account afterwards.
Biography
Betsy West is an American documentary filmmaker, producer and video journalist. With Julie Cohen she directed and produced the 2018 film RBG, a documentary about Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg that received an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature.
West previously worked as a producer and executive at ABC News, where she won 21 Emmy Awards, and as senior vice president at CBS News, overseeing programmes including 60 Minutes and 48 Hours. She is the Fred W. Friendly Professor Emerita at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She has also directed or co-directed the documentaries My Name is Pauli Murray (2021), Julia (2021) and Gabby Giffords Won't Back Down (2022).
