North Country

North Country had me going for a while. Yes, it's predictable and sticks close to the formula for all successful real-life-court-case dramas. (Think Erin Brockovich, in particular). But it has a terrific central location in a North Minnesota Iron Mine, which director Niki Caro films as a cesspool that's equally treacherous and grim. It features a bunch of great Bob Dylan songs on the soundtrack (fittingly, as it turns out, because the singer was born in a Northern Minnesota mining town). And, yes, it has a pretty great, steely performance from Charlize Theron as the determined, traumatized sexual harrassment victim who will turn the tables on her tormentors.

So, for a while, the film works as an acting showcase and a "social issue" piece. It's bleak but not too bleak, and it does have a hell of a cast, full of familiar faces like Frances McDormand and Richard Jenkins and Sean Bean and Sissy Spacek and Woody Harrelson.

And then it just goes totally off the rails. The courtroom scenes that make up the film's climax are laughably ridiculous. A bogus romantic sub-plot is thrown in, seemingly at will, in addition to a random terminal illness. A union meeting populated entirely by enraged sexual predators becomes the setting for a sensitive monologue that could not be less true to life if it were performed by Jar Jar Binks. Revelation piles on top of revelation, until the film starts to seem less like a historical docu-drama about iron unions and more like the season premiere of "The O.C." A sincere, earnest story based on true events, in other words, turns into another overblown, ludicrous piece of mawkish Hollywood bullcrap. Which is always disappointing to see.



I don't want to to give too much away, but let me just say that, to all you wannabe screenwriters out there, you should never give one of a film's main characters Lou Gehrig's Disease unless you have a really really super good reason. Cause, I mean...Wow. That's just pushing the boundaries of sense and good taste right there.

So the filmmakers can get away with those kind of silly flights of fancy, all the names and specifics have been changed. But North Country is based on the real case of the first successful class action sexual harrassment lawsuit in the United States, Jenson v. Eveleth Mines. In the film's version, mother of two Josey Aimes (Theron) struggles to support her family amidst rampant harrassment and intolerance from her male co-workers at the Pierson Iron Mine.

At the film's opening, she's on the floor, left bruised and bloodied by her abusive husband. So Josey grabs her daughter Karen (Elle Peterson) and son Sammy (Thomas Curtis) and heads for her parents' house in the North Country of the title. Dad (Richard Jenkins) works in the mine already, but he doesn't think his daughter should go getting a job there. Like all the other men in town, he's threatened by the notion of women working at the plant, even though they have to hire 'em by law.

Once Josey starts working there anyway, encouraged by her tough-as-nails friend Glory (Frances McDormand) and the high salary that she can't make anywhere else in town, she finds the men difficult to deal with. Her old high school flame, Bobby (Jeremy Renner, who memorably played Jeffrey Dahmer in a film a few years ago), is now her boss, and takes every opportunity to grab her ass or make lewd comments. Bad innuendo abounds at the mine, actually, as do disgusting pranks that sometimes even involve key bodily fluids.

And in setting up the horrors that await Josey and her new friend Sherry (the ridiculously cute Michelle Monaghan, of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and this summer's Mission: Impossible 3), Caro and screenwriter Michael Seitzman do a pretty solid job. They actually manage to go further in depicting the harrassment than I expected. You know there will be grabbing of asses and references to fellatio, but some of this stuff is hard to even watch. You understand why Josey would be reduced to tears at the end of a shift at this place.

The movie just has a far better idea of how to handle the set-up to this particular story. Theron's convincingly wounded, and the scenes of her family being ripped apart by rumor, innuendo and intolerance are harrowing. But there's just no satisfying pay-off to this story. Caro and Seitzman bungle just about every important sequence in the film's second half, relying on lame movie devices like "surprise witnesses."

And the Lou Gehrig's Disease stuff...I'm sorry, but it's just way way too far. You can just tell when a movie's gone too far, and that's exactly what happens here. Again, I don't want to say which character will actually contract this fatal syndrome, wasting away before our eyes, but it's so cheap and manipulative that I got taken out of the movie.

The courtroom stuff, too, is straight "Law and Order." I've never been in a real courtroom during a trial, but I can tell you, for certain, that no court on Earth has ever really operated this way. A lawyer will be harrassing a witness, the other attorney will object, the judge will sustain the objection...and the original lawyer will just keep on talking and asking questions.

Um, no, excuse me, Bill S. Preston Esquire, but when an objection is sustained, that means you can't keep asking that question. Or did I miss that episode of Perry Mason where he gets around that rule?

And, while I'm on the subject, another thing I never want to see again in one of these movies: the bit where one person stands, to indicate that they are siding with the protagonist, and then all the other nay-sayers from the movie begin to stand up slowly, one by one, in a growing display of solidarity. It's such horseshit. Never happens that way. Either everyone would stand up or no one would...How would you know when it was your turn to stand otherwise? You'd always be half-standing, getting ready to stand, but then seeing that someone else was going to stand, so you'd kind of sit back down, but not all the way because then maybe you were going to stand up next. Because you wouldn't want to be left out, and wind up the only one not standing. So it would be this awkward bobbing and weaving session of everyone trying to stand up at once, once they had realized that was the way the crowd was turning. Anyway, these scenes are always stupid and unrealistic and should be dispensed with immediately.

It's just a shame, this movie. It ruins some nice performances and some great music and some nice shots of trucks driving down snowy highways towards ominous quarries with unneccessary last-minute theatrics.