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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
This well-acted moral melodrama can't quite outrun the grinding wheel of formula.
Frances McDormand and Charlize Theron in "North Country."
Oct 20, 2005 | If Hollywood producers insist on continuing to make big, achingly earnest pictures about salt-of-the-earth working people and their struggles, they could do a lot worse than "North Country." It features one of those patented, highly committed performances from Charlize Theron, the lovely young South African who has somehow become the go-to gal for dubious American hairstyles and regional American accents. Whether or not she'll win another Academy Award I don't know, but she can start practicing those Oscar-night reaction-shot faces in the mirror right now.
"North Country" is also quite beautiful to look at: Director Niki Caro and cinematographer Chris Menges have captured the wintry remoteness of northern Minnesota's Iron Range -- which looks wintry even in seasons that aren't winter -- in glorious wide-screen images (even though much of the film was shot in the New Mexico mountains). This movie pines for authenticity with an almost palpable ache, and in its expensive fashion achieves a reasonable simulacrum of it, from Sissy Spacek with her glasses on a chain and a plate of strudel in her hand to the crumbling clapboard cottage with porch rails made from lengths of three-quarter-inch pipe.
All the other pillars of this particular genre -- let's call it high-end social realism -- are also in place. We've got working-class female bonding, exemplified by the on-screen friendship between Theron and the inimitable Frances McDormand. We've got a seductive trailer-park tramp (Michelle Monaghan) who does the right thing in the end. We've got someone dying of an incurable disease. We've got a silent dad and an enabler mom, a hard-boiled white knight riding in from New York City and the struggle to save a troubled teen. We've got drunken revelry on girls' night out, complete with a karaoke performance of "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" and a couple of guys who turn out not to be shit-heels. People in the film biz have been calling this one "Erin Brockovich Goes to Fargo" all along, but that isn't quite fair. It's "Norma Rae Goes to Fargo."
There's a sort of post-Pauline Kael truism in movie criticism that audiences never like to be lectured, that they enter the theater in search of pure pleasure. Along comes a large-scale moral melodrama like this one, rooted in a Frank Capra-style mythological view of the American heartland -- the kind of movie where characters lock their knees against the wide-open landscape and deliver homilies about the Right Thing to Do and the Way This Country Was Built -- and you realize that pleasure is a complicated business.
"North Country" is well acted and honestly made, as these things go, and I suspect large numbers of people will really like it. Are they just putting up with the speeches about gender equity in order to see Theron deliver another juicy troubled-woman role? I'm not sure about that. Yes, the medicine goes down better with sugar, but the reverse is also true.
We haven't discussed the fact that "North Country" is, as they say, based on a true story. In this case that's more of a mantra than anything else, a penumbra of reality thrown up around a handsomely mounted and utterly familiar work of fiction. It's true that a group of women who worked in the Minnesota iron mines, in and around towns like Virginia, Eveleth and Hibbing (hometown of Bob Dylan, whose music makes several appearances), filed a historic class-action suit that changed American caselaw and led to the sexual harassment policies in place at your workplace and mine. Dramatizing their painful struggle against a hostile company, a hostile union, and the rural, tradition-minded community that nurtured both, is a fine idea for a movie. It also catalyzes a linked set of Hollywood storytelling modes -- the David vs. Goliath courtroom drama on one hand, the heartland family weeper on the other -- that are virtually automatic.
