PLOT: In the late 1980s, a young woman goes back home to Minnesota with her two children and begins supporting herself with a job at the iron mine. She can take the hard work, but the harassment from the men is devastating. Story is based on some true details of the first-ever U.S. class action lawsuit for sexual harassment.
It was still very much a man's world in the iron mines of northern Minnesota in the 1980s.
For economic and social reasons, women were rare and unwelcome in the mines, and those who worked alongside the men learned to put up and shut up in the face of dangerous pranks and crude harassment.
North Country is the story, partly based in truth, of how the shabby treatment dealt to women miners prompted a groundbreaking class action lawsuit for sexual harassment.
The larger story in North Country is told through the specific experiences of one woman, Josey Aimes (Charlize Theron). The story begins in 1989, and Josey's world is one in which her own father questions her decision to leave a battering husband.
Her parents (Sissy Spacek and Richard Jenkins) are dead set against her working at the mine, but work at the mine she will, for Josey has two children to raise. For any woman, working in the iron mines is a job you can't get without a pelvic exam to ensure you are not pregnant.
Those were the days, you might say. Or not.
Two old friends also employed at the mine loom large in the story -- one is a buddy, Glory (the inimitable Frances McDormand) and one is an old classmate, Bobby (Jeremy Renner), a man Josey dreads for reasons past and present.
There's a courtroom scene near the start of North Country, so you know where the action is headed. Josey gets that job at the mines -- and endures plenty of creepy behaviour from a handful of the men. The other women miners put up with the comments and with the increasingly violent and disgusting incidents (feces all over the walls in the women's toilets, for example) but when Josey complains to management, everything just gets worse.
She is invited to resign.
The other workers, male and female, turn against her for threatening their livelihood. Her children are bullied at school for their mother's actions.
Once Josey rounds up a local lawyer (Woody Harrelson) and takes action against her employer, her life actually gets worse again. The mine's lawyers put her on trial, in effect ("It's called the nuts and sluts defence,") and the whole town is involved in one way or another.
Much in North Country may be based on true events, but the film's second half is a huge drama pile-on. It's an interesting story, no question, but it's good where it could have been great.
There's too much going on, and the characters are never allowed to become fully three dimensional.
The courtroom drama winds up happily ever after in a fashion that feels somewhat dishonest. And it is. For all that North Country shows in the way of shocking and brutal behaviour, the reality was actually much worse. Even so, many events in the film may well be incomprehensible to a younger generation of women.
And so they should be.
BOTTOM LINE: Fascinating drama about one woman's courage in the face of daunting harassment. Charlize Theron is impressive. As her father, however, Richard Jenkins steals every scene he's in. In the very best way, of course.
(This film is rated 14-A)
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