North Country (2005)

Director:

Niki Caro

Writers (WGA):

Michael Seitzman (screenplay)
Clara Bingham (book) ...

Release Date:

21 October 2005 (USA)

Genre:

Drama

Tagline:

All She Wanted Was To Make A Living. Instead She Made History.

Plot:

A fictionalized account of the first major successful sexual harassment case in the United States -- Jenson vs. Eveleth Mines, where a woman who endured a range of abuse while working as a miner filed and won the landmark 1984 lawsuit.

Plot Keywords:

Miner | Mine | Sexual Harassment | Minnesota | Lawsuit

Awards:

Nominated for 2 Oscars. Another 1 win & 11 nominations

Cast

Charlize Theron	...	Josey Aimes
Elle Peterson	...	Karen Aimes
Thomas Curtis	...	Sammy Aimes
Frances McDormand	...	Glory
Sean Bean	...	Kyle
Woody Harrelson	...	Bill White
Jeremy Renner	...	Bobby Sharp
Richard Jenkins	...	Hank Aimes
Sissy Spacek	...	Alice Aimes
James Cada	...	Don Pearson
Rusty Schwimmer	...	Big Betty
Linda Emond	...	Leslie Conlin
Michelle Monaghan	...	Sherry
Brad William Henke	...	Lattavansky
Jillian Armenante	...	Peg

Also Known As:

Class Action (USA) (working title)
Untitled Niki Caro Project (USA) (working title)

MPAA:

Rated R for sequences involving sexual harassment including violence and dialogue, and for language.

Runtime:

126 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Sound Mix:

DTS | Dolby Digital | SDDS

Certification:

USA:R | UK:15 | Ireland:16 | Australia:MA | Japan:R-15 | Singapore:NC-16 | Netherlands:12 | Hong Kong:IIB | Switzerland:12 (canton of Geneva) | Switzerland:12 (canton of Vaud) | Brazil:16 | Argentina:16 | France:U | Sweden:7 | Iceland:12 | Malaysia:18PL | Malaysia:U (cut) | Finland:K-15 | Canada:14A (Ontario) | South Korea:15

Filming Locations:

Chisholm, Minnesota, USA

Company:

Warner Bros. Pictures

Trivia:

In the scene where Michelle Monaghan is trapped in portable outhouse which is rocked and tipped over by her male co-workers, the supposed human waste was actually made of Gatorade, Coco Puffs, and pumpkin pie fillings.

Goofs:

Continuity: When Bill White is at the bar the first time, from one angle he appears to be drinking Leineinkugel's Honey Weiss beer. When they change angles, he is drinking some other brand. When they go back to the first angle, he's again drinking Leineinkugel's.

Quotes:

Bill White: [looking at the copious amount of stuffed deer and elk head mounted on the walls of the bar] What is this? A pet cemetery?
Kyle: You got a lot of pet elk in your house?

Movie Connections:

Featured in 12th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards (2006) (TV)

Soundtrack:

Girl Of The North Country

Boy, those miners are really MEAN!

The feel-good feminism of Niki Caro's *Whale Rider* from a couple years back becomes a passionate tirade in her new film, *North Country*, based on the landmark sexual harassment case involving miners in the northern Minnesota iron mines. The class action suit was apparently brought in the late Eighties, and finally wrapped up in 1998 -- which may explain why Caro and her screenwriter Michael Seitzman decided that it might be a good idea to simply fictionalize the whole affair. Can't make a movie about briefs being submitted to a court over a period of a decade, I guess. Despite the fictionalization, the movie serves as a timely crash course on how recent the legality of women's safety in the workplace actually is: the characters in the film watch clips from the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings. Sissy Spacek snaps the TV off in horror after Ms. Hill describes Thomas talking about his own penis. These hearings occurred, I believe, in 1991. So, kids, the federal laws on sexual harassment don't date back to the era of black & white TV: "back in the day" was, like, 15 minutes ago. Advances in civilization are always more recent than we think. I can certainly remember the effect of the mining case on my own workplace, even though I'd never heard of it: by the mid-Nineties, we were marched off to sexual harassment sensitivity trainings and were barraged with xeroxes on the subject, to be appended to our Policy Manual. What had seemed like simple common decency had apparently never before been buttressed by the law.

Perhaps because these wounds are still raw, Caro, in depicting this material, goes for the Hollywood Prestige Picture approach, much like Jonathan Demme did in his approach to AIDS with *Philadelphia* back in '93. The signposts are huge and easy to read; the heroes are virtuous sufferers; the villains are pasteboard meanies; the issues are never ambiguous. In other words, *North Country* is simple entertainment, and it succeeds quite well on that level. Even so, I do think that Caro trowels on the villainy rather thickly. We expect to see macho jerks in an iron mine, but the guys in this film are heathen savages, looking and behaving like a San Berdoo motorcycle gang in the grips of a three-day booze-and-meth binge. They literally play in excrement (smearing obscenities on the women's bathroom wall with it) and, in what is probably the first depiction of semen in a mainstream Hollywood film, spray themselves in the women's lockers. Meanwhile, the grab-ass games, adolescent potty-mouth insults, and violent threats are unrelenting from punch-in to punch-out. They don't even let the girls take a pee break, for goodness sake. During all this, we don't really get a sense of Charlize Theron's day-to-day work duties at the mine. Apparently, it's just one terrifying pile-on after another.

Maybe this is just as well for Theron the actress, who admittedly excels in extreme situations. A big, bold actress, dangerously beautiful, she attacks the Powerful Moments with great confidence, leaving all that subtlety stuff to the rest of the top-notch cast, which includes the likes of Spacek as her mother, Richard Jenkins as her father, Frances McDormand as her union rep pal (with a toned-down *Fargo* accent), Sean Bean as McDormand's injured husband, an atypically credible Woody Harrelson as the lawyer who takes on Theron's case, and Linda Emond as the mine's attack-dog defense lawyer. Also, take note of Michelle Monaghan as Theron's co-worker Sherry: a Rising Star, if I may prophesy. *North Country* is ultimately made watchable by these great actors, even if their parts are diagrammatic in the extreme. The obvious case here is Jenkins as Theron's dad: for most of the film he's forced to be an unfeeling, heartless character, who stews in shame about his daughter and doesn't support her when she's suffering at the mine; conveniently, he does an about-face at the union meeting hall, bringing down the house with a great speech that castigates the greasy-haired apes in attendance ("I don't have a friend in this room!"). Jenkins' tone-perfect line reading makes it easy for us to swallow what is otherwise a prime example of Hollywood malarkey of the first order. Say much the same for the rest of the cast's work in relationship to the movie as a whole. *North Country* is ultimately justified by the actors.

4 stars out of 10. Nice Dylan tunes on the soundtrack, incidentally -- though a movie called *North Country* surely required the immortal "Nashville Skyline" version of "Girl from the North Country", in which Johnny Cash duets with Dylan. Such an inclusion would've lifted my rating up to 5.