North Country
The most powerful moment in Niki Caro's sexual harassment drama ''North Country" comes after Josey Aimes (Charlize Theron) shows up at a packed union meeting to reassure her fellow miners that she doesn't want to shut the mine down. She just wants the gropings and obscene name-calling to stop.
As Josey holds the microphone, the men verbally ambush her, until someone finally rises from the fray to her defense. It's a movie moment, at once sentimental and seething, and more movies would benefit from a sequence like this: a surprising flash of tenderness that declares itself in front of an extremely tough crowd.
''North Country" is a tough movie, too. Theron plays an iron miner's daughter who angers her teenage son and shames her daddy when she takes a job at the same Northern Minnesota mine. Her father, Hank (Richard Jenkins), turns a blind eye to the humiliations that Josey and other female miners endure. The other women we meet choose to tough it out, refusing -- for fear of losing their jobs and compromising their safety -- to stand behind Josey as she airs her grievances to the mine's owner and, later, takes her case to court.
Josey has left an abusive husband and moved with her two kids back to her hometown and into her parents' house. An object of scandal in her small Catholic town, Josey first takes a job at a hair salon, where the woman she's about to shampoo happens to be Glory, a childhood buddy, who's played with vinegar by Frances McDormand. Glory operates machinery at a mine and encourages Josey to work there. She'd make six times as much as she would washing hair, which means she would also be making as much as her sour, disapproving dad. Not even her homely and deferential mom, played by Sissy Spacek, wants her to take the job.
Josey's not on the job a day when it becomes apparent what she and her female co-workers are up against. Their trainer makes a few lewd comments then offers them a commandment. ''Rulo Numero Uno: A sense of humor, ladies," he says.
Someone else advises the women to ''roll with the punches," which they find a way to do. The huskier women -- played by Rusty Schwimmer and Jillian Armenante -- have an easier time doing that; Josey and Sherry (Michelle Monaghan), a 19-year-old flirt, are relentlessly pursued. Josey has to take orders from her high school sweetheart (Jeremy Renner), and apparently the long days in those dark shafts have turned him into a caveman. Interestingly, the wisest, most sensitive guy in town no longer works at the mine, has a bad back and one testicle.
The film is set in 1991, and in the parallel universe of Washington D.C. Anita Hill is testifying that Clarence Thomas degraded her on the job. The movie doesn't force the issue, but we get a strong sense of the legal frontier being approached.
As Josey's case intensifies, some of the characters in ''North Country" change their minds and hearts too easily. But it works anyway, in part because the cast, which also includes Sean Bean and Woody Harrelson, is so good, especially Jenkins, a sly, incisive actor whose face you know but can rarely recall from where. (He played the dead dad on ''Six Feet Under.") Theron is the perfect actress for a part like this. She's not so much of a presence that her persona upstages the movie's cause.
I had a deep, purely emotional response to this movie. It infuriated me. It broke my heart. It convinced me that Caro, who's from New Zealand, is a strong, clear-voiced filmmaker, who can bend courtroom cliches to her will. The director's first movie, ''Whale Rider," was also about a young woman who defied male tribal tradition, albeit for different reasons. ''North Country" is about male tribes and the women who refuse to suffer in them.
What was pleasing about ''Whale Rider" is even better about this film: Its atmosphere feels authentic. That frozen northern landscape seems just right. The soundtrack, meanwhile, has balmy flourishes: Gustavo Santaolalla's rumbling guitar-inflected score gives sinew to one grueling, masterfully edited courtroom sequence. That music trades off, unexpectedly, with a handful of smoky, sexy Bob Dylan chestnuts like ''Lay Lady Lay" and ''Do Right to Me Baby." Dylan hails from these parts, and the title comes from his song ''Girl of the North Country."
''North Country" belongs to that group of voice-raising, socially vexed pictures that got going in the '70s. (Josey is uncanny similar to Norma Rae.) The movie was inspired by the book ''Class Action: The Landmark Case That Changed Sexual Harassment Law," though some of the book's facts have been turned, by Michael Seitzman, into Hollywood drama.
''North Country" might feel familiar to anyone who's watched a ''20/20" segment or seen a Lifetime telemovie. But the attendant mawkishness and sensationalism never arrive. Caro makes this woman's story fresher and more resoundingly urgent than shopworn.
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