Warner Home Video DVD
2hrs 6mins
Director: Niki Caro
The question “North Country” seems to answer is not why sexual harassment occurs in the workplace, but more so how it is communally fostered in its different forms. The director, Niki Caro, whose “Whale Rider” was a meditation on women’s roles in the New Zealand Whangara tribe, seems to have found a sister theme in the equally alien Northern Minnesota small town traditions that “North Country” portrays. The film’s answer, however, is somewhat scattered and remote, relying on drama that feels pieced together from other, more robust films (such as “The Accused”, “Norma Rae” and especially “Silkwood”) that attacked injustice with an unrelenting and singular passion from its characters. In “North Country”, we are left only with a sense of depression and bit of confusion due to the detachment of its lead character and an 11th hour plot reprisal that skews the film’s resolution.
We first meet Josie Aimes (Charlize Theron) while fighting with her boyfriend outside her snow-caked home. He gives her a bloody nose and she takes the kids off to her parents in what seems like another chapter in a succession of bad choices. Josie’s gruff dad Hank (Richard Jenkins) comes home from the Eveleth mines, looks her up and down and, with contempt, asks what she has done. This quiet passage alone, one of the film’s most powerful and persuasive, perfectly sums up Josie’s future struggles: her father cannot forgive her teenage pregnancy, an element that underscores the gross sexism in the dying industry town.
Josie finds solace in her friend Glory (wonderful Frances McDormand) who found work at the Eveleth mine as its first female driver. Josie’s interest in the job peaks when she learns of the money her friend is making. Much to her father’s disgust, Josie applies and the job orientation consists of her and her friends being paraded around the work area to cat-calls and other demeaning fare. However, it is a meeting with Bobby Sharp (Jeremy Renner) in the bowels of the mine that sets off a chain of abuse focused on torturing Josie and the other women. They are subjected to one degradation after another until Josie consults former hockey player-turned-lawyer Bill White (always reliable Woody Harrelson) who expounds on the dangers of suing the mine.
What “North Country” does best is to make its heroine all too human. Josie drinks too much, swears too much, makes over-the-top personal decisions but always has a sense of dignity that she fights to externalize. What director Caro also adds is a sense of foreboding in the dark Minnesota streets. In the shadows of monolithic industrial structures is nurtured the community’s darker side. What the second half of the film lacks is cohesive melding of new information with the pre-existing story structure. All we are left with is a weary sense of incompletion.
–Joe Ramirez
