Common Sense Note
Parents should know the movie begins with a woman leaving her husband after he has beaten her (beating is unseen, but her bloody, bruised face is visible). The movie includes tense family scenes, when the woman argues with her father (a miner who believes she should have stayed with her husband), and with her son (who eventually learns the identity of his father, a high school teacher who raped his mother when she was a student: this violent scene appears in flashback pieces, and might upset younger viewers). The film includes repeated scenes of harsh harassment of women workers at the mine: graffiti, rough language, semen left in a locker, a PortAJohn turned over with a woman inside, and one man assaults a woman, pressing her onto a pile of rocks and leaving her dirty and bruised. High school hockey games include some typical roughness. A woman develops Lou Gherig's disease and we see her deterioration.
Families can talk about the courage it takes for Josey to stand up to her employers and her coworkers, including men and women who just want to keep their jobs. She also faces condemnation from her miner father: how does their reconciliation begin when he sees her harassed by other men? How does Josey's relationship with her own kids change as she persists in her struggle for equal treatment on the job and in town?
Common Sense Review
Reviewed By: Cynthia Fuchs
Boldly melodramatic and occasionally overwrought, NORTH COUNTRY celebrates the courage of a woman fighting longtime misogyny and harassment at a Minnesota mine. When Josey Aimes (Charlize Theron) finally leaves her abusive husband, her future looks bleak. She has two children, including teenaged son Sammy (Thomas Curtis), who looks both hopeful and doubtful: "We're not coming back, right?" And with that, she relocates her family to the last place she ever wanted to go, her parents' home in Northern Minnesota. Her mother Alice (Sissy Spacek) looks sad and her father, Hank (Richard Jenkins), makes his own sense of her black eye: "He catch you with another man? That why he laid hands on you?"
Josey endures one travail after another. She takes a job down at the mine, where her friend Glory (Frances McDormand) makes a decent living and serves as a union rep, supported emotionally by her husband Kyle (Sean Bean), who appears to be the single non-Neanderthal in town. Josey soon faces ridicule and rebuke from her male coworkers, their wives, and her employers. Even her dad resents her doing a "man's work" and especially, taking a "man's place" in the limited local economy.
The other women miners -- including the accurately named Big Betty (Rusty Schwimmer) and dour Peg (Jillian Armenante) -- have resigned themselves to the routine. "We can take any crap they dish out, can't we?" encourages Glory. Still, everyone but Glory blames Josey for the increase in abuse, which the film shows in grotesque detail: a former high school classmate, Bobby Sharp (Jeremy Renner), slams her around in a mine shaft, a group of men smear the women's locker room with feces, someone leaves semen inside a woman's locker. Childish, crude, and horrific, these tactics only gird Josey's resistance.
As the film more or less locks you into Josey's perspective, it appears that even the bleak environment (effected by Chris Menges' splendid grey imagery) signifies her perpetual exhaustion. And the sheer weight of her burden is emphasized by director Niki (Whale Rider) Caro's soap operatic inflections: extended takes of pained faces, scenes showcasing family tensions, and plaintive Bob Dylan sound track music all make plain Josey's heavy burden.
She convinces Bill White (Woody Harrelson), a onetime local hockey star and New York lawyer, to help her bring a class action lawsuit against the company. NORTH COUNTRY is based on Clara Bingham and Laura Leedy Gansler's book, Class Action: The Landmark Case That Changed Sexual Harassment Law. The actual case was brought against a Minnesota mining company in 1989, at the start of Bill Clinton's second term (here he's excoriated by a miner for "flooding the market with cheap steel," thus undermining the industry and exacerbating the male miners' frustrations.
At the same time, Caro and screenwriter Michael Seitzman also make a change in the timeframe, making the 1991 Hill-Thomas hearings visible repeatedly on kitchen TVs, and so serving as Exhibit A in Josey's ongoing discussion with her mother (who is in truth only waiting to be convinced Josey's right, as she's also tired of catering to her reticent, needy, seething husband, though she'd never say it).
As much as the movie means well (and means large, as it conspicuously sets up as a second Oscar nomination for Theron), it doesn't trust viewers to keep up (and honestly, it's not moving that fast). Laying on cruelties, climactic plot turns, and tragic figures (Josey sheds earnest tears in the courtroom for gallant supporters as much as for brief, tension-building failures), NORTH COUNTRY overstates its case -- especially in the courtroom scenes -- when, as Spacek demonstrates in her infrequent moments, less is more effective.
Families who enjoy this movie will like the movies from which it borrows structure and theme, Norma Rae and Silkwood. They might also enjoy Matewan, John Sayles' movie about a miners' strike.
Rate It!
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Sexual ContentSexy dancing in a saloon, rape scene shown in flashback. |
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ViolenceRape scene shown in flashback, violent physical abuse of women by at two men. |
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LanguageHarsh, ugly language used against Josey and the other women ( and variations on the f-word); also "damn," "hell," and slang for genitals. |
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Social BehaviorThe harassments at the job and in town are terrible; including assaults and a history of rape, but Josey maintains her dignity and courage. |
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Drug/Alcohol/TobaccoRepeated drinking and some smoking. |
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