It’s kind of funny and kind of wonderful that such a tiny old lady has become a symbol of hope and power for a young generation of voters, but Ruth Bader Ginsburg is just the icon the world was needing recently. Though she has been working tirelessly for decades, it’s only recently that Millennials have given her their highest praise and greatest stature, turning her into a meme.  Perhaps it is the recent turn in American politics that has created a void that RBG is uniquely qualified to fill. Her thoughtful words and stirring arguments have lifted us up in our time of need. And though her career as a Supreme Court Justice may have started out more moderate, the Court’s present makeup has forced her to become more outspoken, a more liberal voice, a voice of dissent.

No woman is born a legend. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a baby once, and then a quiet, serious child, and then a teenager with no patience for small talk. She learned some valuable lessons from her mother before losing her at a tender age. She went to Harvard Law, where she had to justify taking a seat away from a man. She met her husband, Marty, who admired her intelligence during a time when men were meant to dominate their spouses. She finished law school as a mother and a caretaker to her husband, who was stricken with cancer. Long before she was known to her country, she was known to friends and family as dedicated, hard-working, and tough.

As a young lawyer she herself faced gender discrimination before taking up the cases that would help change those laws. She saw herself as a kindergarten teacher in front of many judges, trying to get them to see what life was like for the females in the room. A brilliant legal mind, she made a name for herself with historic wins for gender equality, but it wasn’t until 1993 that Bill Clinton saw fit to appoint her to the Supreme Court. Since then she was been a hero for us all.

Directors Betsy West and Julie Cohen make an excellent biography for an important woman. They demystify her with glimpses into her collar closet (where she adorns her robes with various lace), her surprising friendship with Scalia, her chuckles over Kate McKinnon’s portrayal of her on SNL. Without a boastful bone in her body, RBG is nonetheless tickled by all the attention she’s been receiving. At 85 years old, she’s quite a ways past what most of us would consider retirement age. Luckily the documentary supplies us with perhaps the most hopeful images we could have asked for: the Notorious RBG working out in a gym. Strong in mind and body, she is determined not to abandon us anytime soon.

In 1971, the American government untied itself from the gold standard. Every dollar printed used to have an equivalent in gold hiding somewhere in the vaults. No longer. The U.S. was printing money without abandon, and with the gold standard went fiscal discipline – right out the window. The government was spending way beyond its means and soon, especially under Reagan’s guidance, so were the American people. The 80s were about wealth building. A nation of production became a nation of consumption. You may  not have had the cash for it, but conspicuous consumption was being a good citizen. When American no longer made products domestically, it stimulated the economy by buying things, lots of things, buying, buying, buying. The American Dream has always been about money.

Director Lauren Greenfield has been one of my favourite documentarians for a long time – especially The Queen of Versailles, another treatise on excess and silly spending. Generation Wealth, however, is less of a story, and more of a scrapbook. In putting together images for a new book, she realizes that much of her work has centered on wealth and the various ways we accrue power – money, fame, sex, youth, beauty.

Greenfield revisits many of her old subjects to see how their lifestyles have treated them: the offspring of famous musicians, porn stars made famous by Charlie Sheen, bankers wanted for wire fraud, Kate Hudson’s classmates. She even examines her own family – her parents, her children in terms of their ambition and legacy.

Generation Wealth is a treasure trove of stirring, thought-provoking images and scenes, but it’s not big on in-depth analysis. The images are perhaps meant to stir you to your own internal inventory. And they’re rather sympathetic, in the end. Greenfield’s lens tends not to judge its subjects, but it’s impossible not to start drawing some unflattering conclusions about the way we live. We used to aspire to keep up with the Joneses, our neighbours, who had just a bit more than we did. Now we don’t even know our neighbours. Most Americans can name more Kardashians than they can the people living to the right, left, or even above them. And TV shows oblige. They’ve literally given us the unsubtle Keeping up with the Kardashians, a family famous for being famous, a mother so power-hungry she was willing to trade her daughter’s bodies for cash since that’s the only commodity they had. But images on TV are quite a bit more posh than your next door neighbour’s slightly less dated patio set. Now we’ve got goals way beyond our means.

But have any of our acquisitions bought us happiness? Is it ever enough? And what happens to our economy, our way of life, if we stopped buying in?

Generation Wealth is a career retrospective for Greenfield. Lacking in contextualization, she shows instead of telling, and it’s up to us to draw our own conclusions, which can hardly be anything but bleak.