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In the iron mines of Northern Minnesota, circa 1989, a young woman (a single mother of two with a shady-lady past) goes to work as a miner and encounters personally degrading harassment from the mostly male crew. A compassionate and sensitive rewriting of a true incident--one that took some ten years to resolve in the courts--but possibly overcrowded with too much melodramatic content. Supporting characters--like Frances McDormand's dump truck driver--do not get enough quality screen-time to completely validate the time which they do have. The over-emotional finale is also questionable (were these filmmakers ever in a courtroom before?), but it does provide the audience with the release it needs. In the lead, Charlize Theron gives a finely-wrought, gripping performance; she shows her guts, fear, and bravery, but I'm not sure how convincing she is as mother to an older teenage boy (it seems a little soon for Theron, and the same can be said for Sissy Spacek as the proverbial salt-of-the-earth grandmother). Does the film show all sides and give both the men and the women a fair shake? Probably not, but it's not a man-hater movie either, and since it's told from the female protagonist's point of view, her endurance against certain men is the focal point here. Ultimately, the movie is about her courage, her strength in standing up for herself, and this is expressed here extremely well. *** from ****
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