Film Review: North Country (2005) C+

Date Viewed: 6/26/06
Venue: DVD

North County stars Charlize Theron as a single mother who fights sexual harassment at a Minnesota mine in the late 1980s. Based on a real life case, it plays out like a Lifetime movie with a bigger budget and an A-list cast including Woody Harrelson, Frances McDormand, and Sean Bean with a Minnesota(!) accent.

Not discounting the what the real women of North Country endured nearly twenty years ago, the film basically offers a variation on a story we’ve seen, read, or heard many times by now. If this film had come out in 1992, say, or even 1996, it would’ve carried far more relevance than it does now. Again, I’m not suggesting these women’s struggles are unworthy cinematically, I just believe sexual harassment is so firmly embedded in our national consciousness that this movie falls flat because of it.

The film’s structure doesn’t help. There are occasional flash-forward to courtroom scenes sprinkled throughout. You the viewer are always aware that eventually, Charlize is going to court. Hmm, let’s see, the men are sexually harassing her, what could she be going to court about later…hmm. And hmm, the movie is set in 1989, and sexual harassment was a big thing then…wonder who she’s taking to court? Oh, there’s Woody as her attorney, hey wait a minute, what’s the point of the scene where she has to convince him to take the case when we’ve already seen him in court!? And all the later scenes of Charlize trying to round up the signatures of harassed women and their fear of male reprisals are now officially worthless. We know they’re going to court! Where’s the tension?

That’s not to say there’s nothing good here. The cast is very good as a whole (Charlize even sports an appropriately 1989 fem-mullet), and there are some stirring speeches. But the whole procedure is too weighted down by the simple fact that we know happen long before it does.