Movies

With its gray skies, grit and domestic woes, North Country plays like a slice of kitchen-sink reality.

Like Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story, which also opens today, North Country was also "inspired by a true story" -- a class-action suit brought by female workers in a Minnesota iron mine against on-the-job sexual harassment. But, also like Dreamer, "inspired by a true story" are words that leave lots of room for invention at the hands of screenwriters.

Michael Seitzman based his script on the book Class Action: The Landmark Case That Changed Sexual Harassment Law by Clara Bingham and Laura Leedy Gansler. But except for the basic outline, the film is a fiction, a hardscrabble melodrama about a put-down but not broken woman with a questionable sexual past who fights against injustice in the workplace. It has elements of the 1979 factory drama Norma Rae, certainly, but in its look at how a woman's checkered past can be used against her in court, it also has many elements of The Accused, the 1988 film in which Jodie Foster played a woman seeking justice after being gang-raped in a bar.

Sally Field and Foster won Oscars for those two films respectively and, like them, Charlize Theron gives a solid performance as a woman fighting great odds, personal embarrassment and the taunts of her coworkers to find her own worth and to find justice. For that, North Country is an inspirational film, one that can bring cheers from the audience at the end, although some of it is slow.

New Zealand director Niki Caro's previous big hit was Whale Rider, which she wrote and directed. She seems attuned to both the sensitivities of her Josey, who is battling rough seas, and the human touches of the script. In that, Seitzman has stacked the deck against Theron's Josey Aimes. Theron, who won the best-actress Oscar for 2003's Monster, playing a serial killer on Death Row, again plays woebegone and haggard, although she gets to brighten up occasionally. A battered wife with two children, Josey leaves her husband at the start of North Country, taking her young daughter and 14-year-old boy, Sammy (Thomas Curtis), whose father is a mystery even to Josey. Or so she claims.

Her only option to provide well for her family in northern Minnesota in 1989 is to take a job in the strip mines that have lacerated the earth outside town. Her father (played by Rhode Islander Richard Jenkins), who has worked in the mines all his life, is against the idea. He, like the other miners, feels it's not fit work for a woman. There's resentment, too, because jobs are scarce and getting scarcer. "You got no business being here," her supervisor tells her.

But Josey is encouraged by her longtime friend, Glory (Frances McDormand), and soon is down in the pits. It's not easy work and it's made harder by the male workers who play increasingly mean pranks on the women. When Josey begins organizing the women in protest, the pranks turn nasty.

Here's where Seitzman, trying to show how difficult working at the mine has become for the women and trying to win our support for them, goes overboard. From inappropriate touching to dirty words, things quickly escalate to the point where foul sayings are scrawled in excrement on the walls of the women's changing room. One woman, using a portable toilet in the pit, is horrified when a gang of men tip it over with her inside.

It's all designed to put us solidly in Josey's corner, although things get so out of hand it's hard to imagine the other women not immediately joining her in protest. They're hobbled out of fear of losing their paychecks, but also -- and this is a curious thing hammered home again and again in Seitzman's heavyhanded script -- resent Josey's rocking the boat. There's a sense of "a woman's place" that pervades North Country, which uses televised accounts of Anita Hill's testimony of sexual harassment against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas as background for its own story.

Toss in a life-threatening illness, a return visit by the battering husband and ill will all around and you have a pretty bleak melodrama.

Most of North Country is told in flashback -- including a brutal rape -- from the courtroom where Josey is suing the mine. She has upped the ante with her suit, after finally interesting a reluctant lawyer (a likable Woody Harrelson) to take her case to court. He hopes to turn it into a class-action suit. But her world begins crumbling as the hard-nosed female defense attorney takes aim at Josey's loose sexual history. It creates friction with both her father, who resents her, and her son, who begins calling Josey the unsavory names he has heard her called on the street.

Through it all, Theron maintains an unwavering determination to see things set right for herself and for all female workers who labor under workplace discrimination. It's a knockout performance in an "I'm not going to take it anymore" case, the underdog against great odds and cleverer legal minds.

Jenkins also is very solid as a judgmental man who eventually is strong enough to accommodate the other side of an argument. There's a tense scene in a union hall with Jenkins and Theron against a group of raucous, pigheaded men that bubbles with fire. Jenkins has a grandstanding Mr. Smith Goes to Washington moment here that rings with compassion and common sense. There's also a nice scene Theron shares with Curtis, as well as one with Sissy Spacek, as her resigned mother who eventually discovers her own inner sense of purpose.

***

North Country

Starring: Charlize Theron, Woody Harrelson, Frances McDormand, Sean Bean, Richard Jenkins, Sissy Spacek, Thomas Curtis.

Rated: R, contains violence, sex, profanity, adult themes.