North Country (USA, 2005, Niki Caro) AKA Men are Monsters

The road to Hell may or may not be paved with good intentions, but it is most certainly littered with the battered corpses of a mediocre movie or two. North Country, unfortunately, is just such a film.

North Country is not the first starring role Charlize Theron has taken since her Oscar-winning performance in Monster, but it does return her to familiar territory, playing against type as a downtrodden working class single mother of two named Josey Aimes. “Inspired by” a true story, Theron play a woman who has suffered one indignity and humiliation after another her entire life, and who finally decides that rather than continuing to passively tread water in the pool of oppression and degradation that threatens to drown her, she will rise up against her sea of enemies.

North Country begins with great promise. Director Niki Caro, whose Whale Rider suffered from similar narrative dysfunction, but which still managed to rise above its limitations because of a sense of authenticity she and the actors brought to the mythic tale, uses sound and image effectively to immerse us in the grim reality of this mining community. Early scenes that show Josey struggling to get back on her feet after leaving an abusive husband, and trying to regain the respect of her family as well as the affection of her friends are nicely subdued and effectively acted by Theron and the always terrific Francis McDormand, as Josey’s best friend Glory. Richard Jenkins, as her gruff and stand-offish father Hank, is also reliably solid in a role that begged for more screen time, particularly given how pedestrian the film's denouement turns out to be. Caro really squandered a chance to give us something geniune by choosing to gloss over the many layers in the father and daughter relationship in favour of a yet another issue of the week (an issue that is now a couple of decades old, to boot) courtroom drama. Speaking of which, the story does take place in the 80s, so the Bob Dylan soundtrack seems oddly out of place. Was Bob writing protest music back then? Wasn't that when he was working through his religious phase?

And while Caro builds cachet with naturalistic imagery and realistic tensions, she fritters it away when the story proper begins after Josey enters employment in the mines. Suddenly, the stark honesty of the opening act gives way to movie-of-the-week melodramatics, as sexual harrassments pile atop each other faster than coincidences in a Dicken’s novel, and Josey’s predicament is played out against a vast inert swamp of apathy. The sole voice of grudging support is that of a disgruntled lawyer, a slightly miscast Woody Harrelson who only really looks comfortable here when he’s on skates. He warns Josey that her enemies will use the “nuts or sluts” defense to destroy her legitimate complaints. To drive the point home, Caro gives us a union meeting where all sorts of abuses are publicly heaped upon Josey. This may be the film’s most egregious example of blatant emotional manipulation, but it isn’t the only one. Making matters worse is the shameless decision to pull out of the closet all the creaky mechanisms of the courtroom trial, the exclamation point of which I will not reveal since it is clearly intended to be the climax of the film. But, it is every bit as shameless as the union meeting, and just as hopelessly hokey. And the choice to have Josey's success or failure hinge upon whether or not she was raped as a 16 year-old strikes me as grotesque and exploitative, given the legal matters at stake here. While I don't know how the real case turned out, I'm willing to bet dollars to donuts it was NOTHING like this.

As is often the case with films based on real events, the hoped-for veracity also creates a narrative straightjacket from which the story cannot escape. This is particularly true with a story involving people who are still alive, as the storytellers must pay scrupulous attention to not slandering any of the real people, which unfortunately usually results in banal characterizations and clichéd plotting. Despite its strong opening act, North Country is inevitably a victim of both, as Josey rises so far above her adversaries as to undercut the perceived tensions between her goodness and her fellow miners’ (and their corporate and union bosses’) evil. It’s an appropriately stacked deck, as there’s little doubt whom we should be cheering for, but there’s also never really much doubt about the outcome.

Score: 62/100