North Country

Although Charlize Theron's performance in this David and Goliath story is a compelling one, the film itself is telemovie-ish in its sentimental conventionality despite its quite high production standards.

The Minnesota-set North County tells the story of Josey Aimes (Theron) a fictionalized version of the real life Lois Jensen, a thirty year old uneducated mother of two (from two different fathers) who in 1989  leaves her abusive husband and returns to her parents’ home. She takes a job in local coal mine where she and her fellow female co-workers are subjected to persistent institutionalized abuse, to the point that she snaps and takes the company to court.

The opening titles tell us that the film was "inspired by true events"  but the screenplay by Michael Seitzman based on a book by Clara Bingham and Laura Leedy follows closely the precedents set by films such as Norma Rae (1979) and Silkwood (1983) both of which dealt with feisty unschooled single women taking on bastions of male domination. This sense of following a well-worn path is such that it undermines any sense of dramatic realism, building to a courtroom climax which is so familiar in form that it can only be pure fiction (as are, one suspects, the two convenient references to lawyer and academic Anita Hill who charged her boss, a Supreme Court nominee, with sexual harassment).

New Zealand director Niki Caro who had had a surprise hit in 2002 with Whale Rider does nothing to alleviate the conventionality of the script beginning with a heavy-hand and keeping the sentiment valve turned on full, right through to the leave-‘em-smiling ending.

Charlize Theron was nominated for an Oscar (as was Frances McDormand in the supporting role of her friend, who succumbs with startling rapidity to Lou Gehrig’s disease) and her performance makes the rest of the film worth forbearing. Woody Harrelson is mis-cast as the conveniently appearing, improbably cute lawyer as is Michelle Monaghan an equally improbably spunky co-worker, Shelley (the female staff are whittled down to four, Josey, Shelley and a couple of ball-breaking leviathans). Even less fitting is the incorrigibly white-collar Richard Jenkins as Josey's father, an old school miner. There is a nice touch however in the casting of Sissy Spacek who of course played Loretta Lynn in Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980) as Josey’s mother

For all its tendentiousness, North Country makes its points about ingrained male chauvinism from the factory floor to the company boardroom with force and we can empathize with the commendable message if not Caro’s delivery of it.  

 

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