Review: North Country

As a film, North Country has less confidence in itself than the preening little mullet-cut men in hardhats who strut by Charlize Theron's silky-haired Silkwood at shoulder-height throughout the film. No film on sure footing would ever allow the introduction of a supporting character with Lou Gehrig's disease, nor would it handcuff each of the dramatic moments in the 'A' story to a companion moment showcasing the poor sufferer's plucky resolve. North Country is supposed to be a story about society's stacked deck, but it's a stacked deck itself, undermining our emotional involvement at every turn. For every ounce of drama it earns - and it does earn some - there is a pound of melodramatic lard heaped on to appeal to the Lifetime TV crowd.

Supporting actress Michelle Monaghan spilled the beans when she recently referred to the film as a "chick flick" in the press, prompting a miffed director Niki Caro to respond in Slate Magazine "It surprises me that she said that." It shouldn't. In a film about a woman harassed to the point of psychosis by strange men, the first thing we see in North Country is Charlize Theron's Josie getting leveled to the floor by her husband. They're all the same, those bastards! Josie then runs straight into the arms of her father, played by Richard Jenkins, (Six Feet Under) who levels her with words by more or less accusing her of bringing it on herself, by being an annoying bitch who doesn't understand how lucky she is to have a man earning a living for her. 

The men in this film live a hardscrabble, rock-busting existence working at a dangerous mine, and they expect silent gratitude from anyone in the community who can't hunt with the tribe, including the women. Most of the women in town have internalized this script, and they expect the men to be men, for good and ill. There's a telling scene where Josie's friend Sherry (Michelle Monaghan) approaches Woody Harrelson's older lawyer character in a bar and asks him, in so many words, to take her to bed. When he responds by suggesting she's perhaps too young for him, she calls him a 'homo' and grabs an unsuspecting fellow sitting nearby, pulling him to the dance floor. In little scenes like this, the film has something to say about a brutal working-class existence where not following the time-tested traditions is almost as much of a blunder as going overboard.

The story is loosely, loosely based on the Jenson v. Eveleth civil case, the first class-action sexual harassment lawsuit ever litigated in the U.S. Mine worker Lois Jensen accused her employer, Eveleth Teconite, of looking the other way while she was harassed and assaulted on the job so frequently that she was eventually diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. That case, as you might expect, lasted well over a decade, took many twists and turns and probably had none of the obvious elements that make up a good tear-jerker: abusive husband, bratty kids, unhelpful parents, and so on. There's little in the finished film that's anchored to real world events, except an oddly omnipresent telecast of the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings from 1991, which are dropped in several times during the film to represent good tidings from the women's lib battlefront.

The movie's central conceit, that any capable person is entitled to work where they wish, is probably airtight, but if you're a tall, Nordic blonde who could negotiate her own modeling contracts the world over, then let me open myself up to criticism by saying that you might be asking for trouble by filling out an application at a smoggy mine in the wilds of Northern Minnesota. On the other hand, this is a thought that occurs only after you watch North Country, not during. Charlize Theron is such a talented actress that she nearly overshadows the film's blemishes with an impassioned, tightly controlled performance. She's probably a method actor whether she intends to be or not - there's only so much raw emotion that can be mimed, and the kind of lather Theron works herself into in this film is real on one level or another.

The heroine the film is based on, Lois Jensen, probably looked like Ernest Borgnine, and Theron could have gone that route as she did in Monster, but instead she finds a different blue-collar groove. She makes you believe that she could never have climbed to a higher station in life than the hot chick at the run-down high-school in the middle of nowhere, USA. Her character is a pretty girl with a small-world perspective - she buys the world around her. She's fully engaged in her life and has little to no introspection, to the point that she's genuinely surprised by every new betrayal. There's a late scene in the film between Theron and the company's CEO - a decent man who she has come to trust and rely on - that's so hurtful and outrageous it makes you realize that it would be devastating drama were it not a life-raft floating on a sea of estrogen goop.

The 'events' that occur in the film are not sexual harassment - they're outright assault. The nicest thing the creeps in North Country do is to write the c-word in excrement on a bathroom wall. After that, they get impolite. One woman is locked in a port-a-john and knocked over, and another is pushed down into the gravel and sexually assaulted. I haven't read the book that documents the true events that occurred in the Jenson case, but it seems like the behavior depicted would have led to serial arrests, even if it occurred way back in the barbaric 1980s. However the real case went down, I doubt that the court-room proceedings were interrupted, and the tide in the whole case turned, by a dramatic outburst from the plucky Lou Gehrig's sufferer, as depicted in North Country.