Sky K Studios Movie Blog

North Country

I don't know why I didn't want to watch North Country in the theaters. It would have passed into rapid obscurity after middling reviews last year except that during Oscar nominations, someone smacked his head and said, "Oops! We forgot to put women in movies last year!" and so they gave Charlize Theron a nomination for best actress, and that put the movie back on some people's radar. Mine included.

In Essential Cinema: On The Necessity of Film Canons, Jonathan Rosenbaum distinguishes his project from those of other canon-builders by saying where others (e.g. Harold Bloom, or hell, his evil twin* Allan) worship at the altar of a necessarily transcendent quality of Transcendent Quality (I am so paraphrasing here), he insists that some movies you should watch simply for the importance of their content, not because they necessarily advance the art form qua art form. (Jane Smiley, Ernest Hemingway, have at it.) So that was my attitude going into the movie: it's a fictionalized telling of the first class-action sexual harrassment suit, filed in 1989 against a Minnesota mining company. I like a good social drama, I like movies about labor, and I'm down for a good feminist yarn, and who cares if it ain't gonna give me insights about storytelling.

The movie is a bit clumsy with its storytelling, in telling ways. It's divided into two parts: the straightforward telling of how Charlize Theron's character Josey Aimes came to work at the mine and the harrassment she and the other women experienced there; and the courtroom unfolding of her sexual harrassment suit—specifically, her petition for class status.

The mine story is harrowing and believable in the best of Hollywood underdog stories. Degrading sexual mockery comes nonstop. Women are told they're humorless, to take it like a man, etc. When Ames complains about an assault from a co-worker, she's accused of trying to seduce him&mdashand the accusation comes from the man's wife. (The way that the harrassment shapes the community at large is rendered very well.) Classic Hollywood heartbreaker: Aimes' son calls her a whore. Ooch.

[Spoilers ahead, if you care.]

Unfortunately, the courtroom drama is simply inane. It's hardly news that realistically grinding legal proceedings don't lend themselves to drama, and since the end-title informs us that the case was not settled for nine years, it's reasonable that the filmmakers would choose to use the certification of the class as the fulcrum for the legal drama. But what is this thing? I'm no lawyer, but I feel fairly confident that you can't win in court because, during a lull in the proceedings, your ALS-debilitated co-worker (Frances McDormand) in the back of the room has her husband read a defiant statement announcing that she joins the class, and then some women stand up and join the class, and then some men who work at the mine do too, and then some men who don't work at the mine do as well. I'm pretty sure that's not how it happens. In fact, it smacks of "we are running out of film", and I hope that the development of digital video will relieve us of such artistic compromises in the future.

Other parts of the courtroom scene are a bit more troubling. It comes into the drama a little creakily, but it's no surprise that the company's defence includes labelling Aimes as promiscuous by letting one of her workplace assailants, who knew her in high school, describe her rape by a teacher as consensual. The courtroom mechanics are preposterous, but the technique of using rape as a tool for economic control of women deserves the exposure. The scene, however, is played as a showdown between two men: Aimes' lawyer (Woody Harrelson!) and Bobby, her workplace tormentor. It devolves into a kind of cock-waggling I Deride Your Truth-Handling Abilities showdown.

The most pernicious thing about the movie, in fact, is its inability to show women as the heroes of their own lives. Included on the DVD is a deleted scene that dramatizes this exact problem: the lawyer confesses to Aimes that, behind her back, he met with the company president to discuss the possibility of a settlement.

Another key climactic scene comes when Aimes's friend's husband, played by Sean Bean The Menschy Guy, challenges her young teenage son, who has turned against his mother in the face of the town's animosity. It's another showdown between two males, positioned as the emotional climax to complement the courtroom climax, and it suggests that the real accomplishment of the movie hasn't been women taking power in the face of the twin threats of rape and poverty, but the recuperation of a situation that threatens patriarchal control into one that demonstrates its essential decency. Life lesson: be a man, not a member of the mob.

The same function plays itself out in the relationship between Ames' parents, affectingly portrayed by Richard Jenkins and Sissy Spacek. It's thrilling when Spacek, who has defended her husband's rejection of her daughter when she takes "a man's job", leaves him a note and a sandwich and checks into a hotel. But Mom's emancipation is just a tease for Pa's redemption: in order to keep the social order of his home intact, he has to defend his daughter against the mob of men at a union meeting.

The portrayal of the union hall as a mob scene was troubling, but not totally unbelievable. I would have liked to see the movie state more explicitly how useful it was for the company to have the male workers energized against their sister workers—assigning the blame pattern downwards, as Utah Phillips likes to say. And it's good to see Silkwood for a version of how a union makes it possible to speak truth to power in the workplace.

This seems like an indictment of the movie, but it shouldn't serve as one. The movie was three-quarters great Hollywood underdog drama, with genuine social consciousness in the depiction of sexual harrassment in the workplace. It avoided the trap of portraying white-collar workers as somehow more decent: the company management is somewhat more silken-tongued in its sexism, but just as vicious. It's just that dramatically, it can't bring itself to show women as the agents of their own victory, and I suspect that that's a fundamental trap in Hollywood storytelling.

posted by Josh K-sky at 2:21 PM