Winning an Oscar for best actress doesn’t mean Charlize Theron can do what she likes. It is not a fait accompli that, having been handed the statuette, her success is assured. She can’t do another Monster, because there’s only so much killer-lesbian-ugly you can do in one movie-star career. But neither can she be over-reliant on flashy futuristic action pictures such as Aeon Flux, which so far hasn’t exactly been the blockbuster its makers hoped for. (It was described in the venerable Variety as “spectacularly silly”.)
Just as well, then, that we’ve got a more serious Theron vehicle to be going on with this week, before Aeon Flux hits us with an Elektra-style thump on February 17. Theron is a hard-working actor anyway, doing two or three movies a year, but one suspects she felt she needed something meaty if she wasn’t to lose all her Oscar cred.
North Country, hence, is a big social-issue movie, produced by Participant Pictures, the company founded by eBay billionaire Jeff Skoll to get some progressive propaganda into the film business. (Its others are Good Night, and Good Luck, about the McCarthy witch-hunts, and Syriana, about the oil trade — both made money in the United States.) The big social issue in North Country is women’s rights or, more specifically, sexual harassment.
But we’re not talking about a bit of a fondle by the photocopier here. We’re taking a look into a brutally sexist macho-male culture in which women are dependants, chattels or just sex objects, and how women have had to battle for their rights and their dignity in such a world. North Country, thus, is “based on” or “inspired by” the first class-action suit to deal with sexual harassment in the US, one fought by a bunch of women miners, and one which, in reality, took a decade to resolve, dragging on until 1998.
Theron plays Josey Aimes, based on the woman central to the real case. It would appear, though, that the character has been highly fictionalised for dramatic reasons. She’s no Erin Brockovich, but neither is she the mysterious folkloric creature represented by Bob Dylan’s Girl of the North Country, though there’s some significant Dylan on the soundtrack (including a new song, Tell Ol’ Bill) and this North Country is where he originally came from.
Her two children in tow, Josey flees an abusive husband and heads back to her parental home in North Minnosota, where her father works on an iron-ore mine. She is determined to be self-reliant, to bring up her children without a man, and so she applies for a decent-paying job at the mine — the US Supreme Court having recently legislated the rights of women to equal employment opportunities.
Josey’s father is as opposed as the rest of the male miners to her taking such a job, and his treatment of his own daughter points to the deep-seated sexism of such a world. The miners’ harassment of Josey and the other women who take jobs there show that in such instances sexual attention is not a matter of wanting to make sweet love to some sexy chick; it’s more about power, control and revenge. In that respect, North Country is perfectly frightening, and rams home its message with exemplary force.
One can see this is an ideal project for director Niki Caro, who made Whale Rider, which also dealt with the place of women in tradition-minded societies; it’s a powerful extension of her previous work. But it’s perhaps a little too powerful. We’re obviously meant to feel for Josey, but her misery and down-troddenness is portrayed so relentlessly that for the first two thirds of the movie one simply gets increasingly depressed.
Then the turnaround begins as Josey fights back, and the last third of North Country is a courtroom drama that feels rather fake compared to the grit that came before. There is a strong whiff of tub-thumping in the air. The court case is over-dramatised and highly personal — suddenly we’re focusing on the minutiae of Josey’s sexual history, and the courtroom theatrics go right over the top. Perhaps that’s how it was, but it twists the tone of the film, and it makes North Country seem like two different movies awkwardly bolted together.
That said, it’s not a bad movie, and one has to commend the striking cinematography by Chris Menges, as well as the generally strong performances. Woody Harrelson as the lawyer who fights for Josey, and Sissy Spacek and Richard Jenkins as her parents, deserve favourable mention, while Frances McDormand (always worth watching) has a role that combines a tough, likeable personality and an opportunity to do some suffering too. And, winning herself a best-actress Oscar nomination, Theron does a solid, credible job in the lead role — one that allows her to get her pretty face dirty without having to do the full Monster.