North Country

I liked the fact that the filmmakers didn’t marginalize the female miners’ suffering by attempting to pass the characters off as genuine real-life portrayals, which in the end made this movie more enjoyable to watch.

Josey Aimes (Charlize Theron) is a completely fictionalized version of Lois Jenson, the real-life plaintiff in the successful class-action sexual harassment case against the Eveleth Mine in northern Minnesota. The film starts with Josey and her two children leaving her physically abusive husband in order to move back in with her parents. When she arrives back home with a battered face, her father asks her if she deserved it, which immediately informs the audience that the pervading social attitude during the 1980’s is still that women are probably at fault for all domestic problems. At first taking a job as a hairdresser, she runs into an old friend, Glory (Frances McDormand), who convinces her to apply for a job at the local mine where she can make a significant amount of money. Obviously, after a bit of discouragement from her parents, she takes the job anyway and immediately begins to endure the humiliating comments and practical jokes that her female coworkers have long been forced to tolerate.

The women are constantly reminded to have a sense of humor about the offensive belittlements that are viciously flung at them, yet they understandably have a hard time laughing when being groped or made to clean off sexual profanities written in excrement on the walls of their locker room. When Josey complains to her supervisor, he tells her to shut her mouth and take it like a man, refusing to acknowledge the harassment and even taking part in it himself. As Glory constantly reminds Josey, the men do not want women working at the mine, and she advises Josey to grow a “gatorskin” in order to persevere. The other women, for their part, adamantly refuse to complain about the situation, as they fear that the persecution would worsen and force them to quit their much-needed jobs. When Josey finally makes a formal complaint to the company itself, she is told to either resign, or spend less time in the beds of her married male coworkers and instead work on improving her job performance. Having finally reached the proverbial last straw, Josey hires a lawyer and attempts to enlist her coworkers’ support in suing the mine.

The female characters were mostly a conglomeration of several women actually involved in the case, so while their Hollywood versions were embellished for entertainment’s sake, the attitudes and examples of harassments were disturbingly real. Aside from one or two somewhat slow parts in the movie, I found North Country to be quite compelling and emotional. My date didn’t seem to take issue with the melodramatic nature of the movie, so I don’t think that this is a film that would only appeal to women. Considering the wide range and nature of the male characters in the movie, I would think that most men could relate in some way to some of the male characters’ reactions to the tense environment at the mine. North Country was certainly not a man-bashing movie, as only a small portion of the miners took part in the abuse, leaving everyone else room for sympathy.

Despite a somewhat ridiculously melodramatic courtroom scene toward the end of the movie, North Country was a very respectable film. I definitely recommend it in spite of its predictable ending, because it was at times powerful and always thoughtful.