North Country

Intimidation moves to menace as Charlize Theron (Josey) fights for her right to work at the mine.

Herald rating: ****

An unabashedly old-fashioned fight-for-justice film that fudges the real-life facts in the cause of an uplifting story, this first American outing for the director of Whale Rider is nonetheless an accomplished and stirring melodrama that proves its maker's solid talent.

It may draw its heroes and villains in broad and unsubtle strokes and it resorts to some pretty hokey final-reel manipulations, but it would take a hard heart to be unmoved.

The film is inspired by the true story of Lois Jensen, who in 1975 took a groundbreaking class action suit against a mining company. Women, granted the right to work there by a Supreme Court decision on affirmative action, were subjected to relentless harassment by the Neanderthal male miners determined to maintain the male-only culture.

Jensen's fictionalised equivalent is Josey Aimes (Theron), a solo mum who ditches her abusive husband and, with her two kids in tow, heads back to Minnesota to live with her parents (Spacek and Jenkins). When her friend Glory (McDormand) suggests she get work at the mine, her traditionalist parents are less than impressed: her mother warns her it will shame her father, a man who assumes the marriage is on the rocks because Josey was sleeping around.

But the Aimes' misgivings are as nothing compared to the reaction of the miners who embark on a campaign of intimidation and persecution that starts out as demeaning and quickly moves through vulgar to deeply, perilously menacing. When Josey meets Bill White (Harrelson), a faded ice-hockey star turned jaded lawyer, her resolve hardens, despite the opposition of her female workmates. He's hardly gung-ho: he recommends that she "find a new job and start over". "I don't have any start-over left," she says.

The film's opening half-hour is a small miracle of narrative economy that seamlessly elides past, present and future (take a bow, film editor David Coulson, another New Zealander) to set up the story and create a crackling dramatic tension. Caro shows a sensitive touch, working with a fine cast (Jenkins, the dead father in Six Feet Under, and the ever-reliable McDormand are standouts). Meanwhile wonderful work by acclaimed cinematographer Chris Menges evokes the mine as a looming landscape of dark satanic mills, like a Hieronymus Bosch nightmare. The aerial shots are particularly effective and the soundtrack, dense with songs from Minnesota's favourite son Bob Dylan, is a cracker.

Sure, the movie smoothes over the tortuous real-life legal process; it took Jensen 23 years to get justice, but this isn't a documentary. Sure, the subplots (one involving McDormand and the other a long-buried secret in Josey's past) are at least one too many. Sure, the courtroom climax is a bit Perry Mason. But North Country is a film quite devoid of pretension and rich in Hollywood virtues. As heart-tugging drama, it pushes all the right buttons.

CAST: Charlize Theron, Frances McDormand, Woody Harrelson, Sean Bean, Sissy Spacek, Richard Jenkins
DIRECTOR: Niki Caro
RUNNING TIME: 126 minutes
RATING: R13, Violence, offensive language and sexual references SCREENING: Village, Hoyts, Berkeley