DVD Review: Niki Caro’s North Country on Warner Home Video

Finally, a movie to bring lovers of bad soap opera and aficionados of golden showers and scatting together at last.

North CountryInspired by a true story. Words few films, if any, can live down because they indicate a filmmaker’s unwillingness to seriously deal with the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. In the case of the didactic North Country, Whale Rider director Niki Caro dumbs down the nation’s first class action sexual harassment suit (Jenson v. Eveleth Mines) by turning it into a shameless Oscar bid for a visibly game Charlize Theron, whose Josey Aimes rises from the martyr’s ashes of Norma Rae, Karen Silkwood, and Erin Brockovich to defend the rights of a group of women, including her best gal-pal Glory (Frances McDormand, fusing her spunky Fargo cop role with Hilary Swank’s Million Dollar Baby fighter), to work at a northern Minnesota mine without fear of getting dildos put inside their lunch boxes.

Single-mindedly and calculatedly devoted to conveying a relentless feeling of sexual terror, Caro’s crusade of righteous indignation—unmitigated by an authentic sense of peace and calm—misrepresents the hostility of the world. At the Pierson mining plant, the Neanderthal men call women bitches, lock them up inside port-a-potties, cum on their clothes, and write the word “cunt”—in shit no less—on their bathroom walls. All in a day’s work the men will tell you, but even what should be an innocuous night out on the town is bursting at the seams with a fanatical and unexamined mood of emotional humiliation: Bill White (Woody Harrelson) is called a “homo” by a hot-to-trot 19-year-old for not punching her dance card, and just as he approaches Josie for an introduction, he’s totally cock-blocked by one of her co-workers.

Caro’s signature special effect is the overhead—her camera gawks at the mining plant as if it were The Shining’s Overlook—and Gustavo Santaolalla’s Deadwood-esque score is so laden with banjos it probably won’t come as a surprise that Josie’s deliverance is predicated on the revelation that (spoiler alert!) she was raped from behind as a teenager. If the film’s small-town condescension is stunning, its assessment of sexual politics is nothing if not bone-headed. The men and women of the film are defined entirely by their sex (in one scene, their differences are gauged using an animal herding metaphor) and neatly pit against one other—or, rather, Josie and the audience are set against the men, with Josie’s pussycat colleagues straddling the line between both camps until someone delivers a tidy enough speech to convince the preposterously fickle lot to pick the right side.

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Josie has it so bad even her son calls her a whore. This hatred, along with the background noise of Anita Hill’s crusade against Clarence Thomas, galvanizes Josie to take her battle to the courts with Bill as her lawyer, and North Country turns on itself like some rabid animal with its leg caught in a bear trap, losing its propagandistic mind and going apeshit during a laughable courtroom smackdown that rivals the tawdry and shameless shenanigans of The Contender. Like Joan Allen’s Vice Presidential candidate from the Rod Lurie film, Josie’s cause is no longer on the table—her past is, except she decides to actually defend her sainthood. That she has to sell herself as a victim of rape in order to justify her cause is a quandary that eludes Caro and finally exposes North Country for the shortsighted soap opera that it is.

Image/Sound

An incredibly clean and handsome transfer-Charlize Theron has the eyes and skin of an angel (two thumbs up!)-but colors are a little muted (it’s difficult to tell if it’s blood or shit hanging on her face when her character rises in one scene from her mother’s kitchen floor). The surround track is quiet and atmospheric but not very dynamic (I remember Frances McDorman’s famously ridiculous “fuck you” having more kick)-from the dialogue to the score, the whole enterprise seems rooted almost entirely in the center channel.

Extras

A making-of documentary that intertwines scenes from the movie with taking-head interviews by director Niki Caro and some of the real women involved in the Jenson v. Eveleth Mines harassment case, with the president of NOW also chiming in from time to time. (Not surprisingly, the women who lived the film tell a considerably less melodramatic version of what happened.) Rounding things out is a collection of deleted scenes, a theatrical trailer, and trailers for two other films similarly contemptuous of women: Must Love Dogs and Monster-in-Law.

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Overall

Finally, a movie to bring lovers of bad soap opera and aficionados of golden showers and scatting together at last.

Score: 
 Cast: Charlize Theron, Elle Peterson, Thomas Curtis, Frances McDormand, Sean Bean, Woody Harrelson, Jeremy Renner, Richard Jenkins, Sissy Spacek, James Cada, Rusty Schwimmer, Linda Emond, Michelle Monaghan, Brad William Henke  Director: Niki Caro  Screenwriter: Michael Seitzman  Distributor: Warner Home Video  Running Time: 126 min  Rating: R  Year: 2005  Release Date: February 21, 2006  Buy: Video, Soundtrack, Book

Ed Gonzalez

Ed Gonzalez is the co-founder of Slant Magazine. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle, his writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications.

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