FrancisPage

Reel To Reel:
North Country

How It Rates: ***1/2
Starring: Charlize Theron, Frances McDormand, Sissy Spacek
Rated: R
Red Flags: Intense depiction of sexual harrasment, rape, and language

If it weren't for a melodramatic, over-the-top courtroom sequence in the final moments of the picture, North Country would be a 4 out of 4. So feel free to snip that scene out of your head when you see it coming -- maybe get up and take a potty break. Believe me, you won't miss anything powerful or climactic.

I can safely tell you Josey Aimes, the miner mother played by Charlize Theron, is triumphant in a landmark sexual harassment lawsuit against a northern Minnesota taconite operation in the late 1980's. That real-life suit, settled out of court, forced companies to institute sexual harassment policies. The outcome of the picture is no mystery. The journey there is the picture's emotional core, and it is more riveting than any courtroom drama thrown in as devices to move the story forward.

As the film opens, Josey escapes a physically abusive boyfriend by coming home to an emotionally abusive father (Richard Jenkins) and her stand-by-your-man mother (Sissy Spacek). Her life to this point could be its own picture, with two children by two different men. Her daughter seems to be doing all right, but her teenage son has never met his father and hates his mother's guts relentlessly. Josey's father still hasn't forgiven her for fathering that son as a teenager out of wedlock.

An old friend and union rep Glory (McDormand) talks Jess into a fresh start by working at the mine, which hires women only because the Supreme Court said it had to. Some fresh start. Taconite is a low-grade iron ore, and the outnumbered women are treated lower than the grade of the ore. The place is oinking with so many male chauvenist pigs the lunch room should be filled with troughs. They are 40 and 50-year-old schoolyard bullies.

I won't detail the cruelties Josey and the other women suffer, only to say that they would never be tolerated in any workplace today. The men see it as fun. The women learn not to see it, to shut up, and take it. Only Josey won't. She is dumbfounded her union, the one that collects from her paycheck, the one supposed to be protecting workers, allows the abuse to continue. A plant supervisor is unforgettable as the farmer tending the swine. His northern-Minnesota accented "it's like this, dont-yer-know" mentality masks his own deep realization he is a victim too, powerless to stop the harassment. Eventually Josey enlists the help of a former hockey player turned lawyer Bill White (Woody Harrelson), who warns her own tawdry past will be put on trial.

The picture is a psychological horror film with one indignity piled on top of another, a sort of Passion Of The Christ for blue-collar women. Theron remixes the grittiness she won an Oscar for in Monster, and I don't buy USA Today's swipe she's too pretty to play this role. I think an Oscar more than qualifies. A lot of you will wonder how men can be so cruel to others and laugh at it. Believe me, they can. As this picture rolled into theaters, advertising guru Neil French resigned after telling an industry group women did not make it to the top because "they're crap." Wonder no more.