Looking at 4’ 6” Dr. Ruth Westheimer, it’s almost difficult to believe how much she’s achieved. In 90 years of life, she’s written 40 books (as of this review), hosted a daytime talk show, given advice to generations of lovelorn radio callers and done countless interviews on late-night TV. Given that, it’s hard to imagine there’s anything left to say about America’s most famous sex therapist, but Ask Dr. Ruth, the documentary directed by Ryan White that screened at the Tribeca Film Festival today, manages to reintroduce us to a figure we thought we already knew.
The film — which hits theaters on May 3rd before hitting Hulu on June 1st — is remarkable first and foremost for its access. White not only assembles his film from interviews with Dr. Ruth’s friends and family, but also decades-worth of TV and radio recordings and personal documents from her archives. The centerpiece, though, are the hours of footage White took while following the doctor around. She is constantly in motion, running from interview to interview to the point where her assistant admits he would have retired years ago if she hadn’t kept going. Despite her age, Dr. Ruth is as lively in these new interviews as she always has been and part of what makes the film so enjoyable is watching her lighthearted reflections on her decades-long career—which White covers from her early childhood in Hamburg, Germany to now.
Still, while White’s primary goal is to detail a life many have heard of but may not know, he’s also not afraid to occasionally question her legacy. One of the film’s most striking sequences comes when Ruth’s daughter, Miriam, and her granddaughter, Leora, ask whether she identifies as a feminist. Her answer is unequivocal: no. Leora is clearly frustrated by that response and it’s easy to understand why. As she pushes her grandmother to express her support for many of modern feminism’s tenets — equal pay, abortion — it’s clear that Ruth is one whether she takes ownership of the term or not. Miriam eventually gets her to agree that she’s a “non-radical” feminist, but it’s still somewhat surprising to see someone whose work is so clearly tied to feminism seemingly fall into the patriarchal trap of distancing herself from those “bra-burning” extremists.
That said, despite her views and the work she’s spent much of her career doing, Ruth’s commitment to being apolitical is a recurring theme. As she explains it, she doesn’t want to risk alienating someone from taking her advice because their political beliefs differ. And while photos of Ruth with Hilary Clinton or laughing over a political cartoon depicting her as a mediator between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-Un undercut her claims of neutrality, both White and Ruth’s family and friends posit a different motivator for her views: empathy and her integrity as a physician.
There are many of examples of Dr. Ruth’s willingness to speak frankly and publicly about taboo subjects, but most moving is her work during the AIDS crisis. Ruth had an enormous platform during the ‘80s–specifically in New York City–when the disease was still thought to be some form of cancer and she frequently spoke of both it and homosexuality without stigma. When a man in a talk show audience tries to emphasize that the disease is mostly restricted to the homosexual population, clearly about to pivot to the kind of veiled homophobia that drove the conversation at the time, she shuts the line of questioning down, saying that who is most affected is unimportant. Her focus is care and finding a cure. As she explains to White, she remembers what it was like to see classes of people treated as “sub-human” during the Holocaust and she actively fights against that in the discourse during the AIDS Crisis.
As is perhaps inevitable, Dr. Ruth’s experiences during the Holocaust loom large over the whole film. Part of that is because of the way White chooses to tell her story. Rather than relay it chronologically, he frequently cuts back to her remembrances of her childhood — first with her parents in Hamburg and then to the orphanage where she spent her adolescent years in Heiden, Switzerland. Rather than use re-enactments to relay that period, White uses animation by Neko Productions to visualize it. While the colorful, painterly images are an unexpected way to allow us to see the extraordinary circumstances of Dr. Ruth’s life, they can also be distancing in an uncanny valley way. The same distancing quality is also true of the scenes where actors read passages from Dr. Ruth’s diaries and the weekly letters her parents sent her during her first few years in the orphanage. Thankfully, however, what’s in those documents is so compelling that they easily overcome the techniques used to relay them.
While moments where she eloquently describes a break-up are still poignant even now considering Dr. Ruth’s profession, it’s the passages where she talks about her parents that are most emotional. When she first arrives at the orphanage, she describes her loss and sadness over the separation and when their letters abruptly stop, it’s heartbreaking to hear her begin to mark time by that absence. Her emotion in that writing is deep and devastating, so it’s surprising to hear her friends and family then detail how little she talked about those experiences as an adult. In stark contrast to her children’s explanation that she never had to sit them down to talk about sex because the information was always available in their home, Miriam notes that she wasn’t told about her grandparents so much as she suddenly realized that she didn’t have them on her mother’s side while many of her classmates did.
And though it’s easy to want to criticize someone who’s devoted their life to a certain type of therapy for keeping herself so emotionally closed off, as Miriam herself admits, if keeping that part of her life private and in a box even from her family is what it takes for Dr. Ruth to live life as fully as she has, then maybe it’s not so bad. The closest the doctor comes to explaining how losing her parents drives her is to say, “I have an obligation to live large and make a dent in this world.” After watching Ask Dr. Ruth it’s clear she’s succeeded.
