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| Director
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Niki Caro
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| Starring
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Charlize Theron, Jeremy Renner,
Frances McDormand (Full Cast) |
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| The plot of
North Country |
A fictionalized account of Jenson vs. Eveleth
Mines, the first major successful sexual harassment
case in the United States, where a female miner
(Theron) who endures a range of abuses files a
landmark lawsuit. |
North Country
Movie Review
|
Review by David
Edelstein:
North Country (Warner Bros.) opens with Charlize Theron
as Josey Aimes, a housewife and mother, getting beaten
by her spouse and driving the kids to the home of her
parents (Sissy Spacek and Richard Jenkins), who wonder
what she did to make her husband so mad—sleep
with another guy, maybe? It must've been something.
Her dad doesn't take kindly to Josey when, in an attempt
to be self-sufficient, she applies for a job at the
local iron-ore mine. The Supreme Court did say women
can do anything men can do, but the mine ain't no place
for girls, and anyway, jobs are scarce enough without
females in the workplace. The first thing Josey hears
at orientation is a muttered epithet beginning with
"c"; this is, however, positively collegial
compared to having it scrawled in fecal matter on the
walls of the women's locker room. The company doctor
puts Josey in stirrups and fills the fellas in on the
state of her privates. Then comes the innuendo and outright
slander, the gazes both leering and baleful, more "c"
and "b" utterances, sexual menacing—and,
to add insult to injury, there's Anita Hill getting
grilled by males on TV while her mother tsk-tsks and
says, think of that poor man's family. Even her son
calls her a whore. And then there are the flashbacks
to when Josey was a teenager, and if you think she's
getting sexually harassed now…..more..
Review By Andrew
O'Hehir:
If Hollywood producers
insist on continuing to make big, achingly earnest pictures
about salt-of-the-earth working people and their struggles,
they could do a lot worse than "North Country."
It features one of those patented, highly committed
performances from Charlize Theron, the lovely young
South African who has somehow become the go-to gal for
dubious American hairstyles and regional American accents.
Whether or not she'll win another Academy Award I don't
know, but she can start practicing those Oscar-night
reaction-shot faces in the mirror right now."North
Country" is also quite beautiful to look at: Director
Niki Caro and cinematographer Chris Menges have captured
the wintry remoteness of northern Minnesota's Iron Range
-- which looks wintry even in seasons that aren't winter
-- in glorious wide-screen images (even though much
of the film was shot in the New Mexico mountains). This
movie pines for authenticity with an almost palpable
ache, and in its expensive fashion achieves a reasonable
simulacrum of it, from Sissy Spacek with her glasses
on a chain and a plate of strudel in her hand to the
crumbling clapboard cottage with porch rails made from
lengths of three-quarter-inch pipe...More..
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