A Minnesota writer who lived and worked at the scene of Iron Range workplace reviews Niki Caro's explosive new film, North Country.
When your hometown is depicted in a disturbing book or in film noir, an eerie otherness sets in. You’ve been there, know its realities, yet cannot reconcile the events. You make excuses; it can’t be that Gosh-awful, a little voice inside tells you. After all, you grew up there.That naïve mind-set I took to Class Action: The Story of Lois Jenson and the Landmark Case That Changed Sexual Harassment Law, by Clara Bingham and Laura Leedy Gansler (New York: Doubleday, 2002). This is the case inspiring Warner Bros.’s finely-crafted new film North Country, directed by Niki Caro (Whale Rider).
The film, billed as fiction, replicates harassment in northern Minnesota where I grew up, literally next to “da pits” (open pit mines) in which I later worked in summers. My hometown, Virginia, on the once-mighty Mesabi Iron Range, is locale for the landmark Nelson case, and the on-location setting for North Country. Once a vibrant place, it now suggests Appalachia. Porches sag, some houses lack for paint. Named after a turn-of-the-century founder’s home state, my hometown is called “The Queen City” by Chamber types, sometimes adding “…of the Iron Range.” Unintended irony is served at present in the hype.
Literally at the edge of deep open pits, Virginia’s ore wealth was stripped long ago to feed Eastern blast furnaces, thus to build cars and trucks — tanks and ships during World War II. Still vibrant in the 1950s when I was raised there, high grade ore was yet being shipped out. The city and its environs were prosperous then, insular, an amalgam of diverse nationalities, but no blacks. It was a pleasant little union town (pop. 12,000) with a Norman Rockwell main drag, Chestnut Street. Virginia excelled in nothing, really, including sports. No one rich or famous was born or died there. It was a friendly, unremarkable place. I loved it.
“Progressive” city fathers early on accepted tribute from the strip mining companies — including the oft-loathed US Steel — to build first-rate high schools, a municipal power plant, and a citywide steam heating system. Now the old mains through which steam is piped citywide crumble under the streets. My old high school, now reflecting wear, has TWO magnificent swimming pools and Grecian statuary in hallways. The district hired only “the best” teachers then, at least those who would migrate to a cultural hinterland 60 miles north of Duluth. Pay was the big draw.
Employment prospects blossomed in my heyday, the ‘50s. Mine-work meant great pay, union scale, for us duck-tailers and crewcut “cool cats.” Minework also bought us jalopies (‘46 Fords were popular) to make low-riding, to “soup-up,” to “tool down” Chestnut Street at necessarily — because of the traffic — a snail's pace. It was American Graffiti all over again. Oh how our dual (a.k.a. twin) tailpipes purred, and sometimes roared.
Piling up funds in summers for college was a snap. Girls were consigned mostly to waitress jobs, car hopping at the A&W, and babysitting. For the older women, clerking and shirt factory employment beckoned — their rightful place, so it seemed then, all rather homelike, sewing on buttons for near minimum wages.
Job-holding prospects expanded for women of the ‘70s. Times were a-changing, as my fellow Ranger Bob (Do Right To Me, Baby) Dylan wailed, ushering in a new, gender-egalitarian age, breaking up that good ol’ boys’ job market domination. The “opposite [?] sex” at last landed real jobs IN the mines. They sweated same as guys, at hard labor such as drilling into hard rock for leftover ore called taconite. Tough jobs, and at a fearsome price - -women workers’ dignity.
“Josie Aimes,” portrayed by gorgeous Charlize Theron in North County, sums it up in her very opening line: “Tell me about tough,” she says to no one in particular. “All who work in the pits are tough.” Quite true.
At the sight of women in the mine, the tough-boy miners feel threatened. Uncouthness sets in, a male boorishness quite beyond dirty jokes. A thin veneer of civility is peeled away, revealing degradation of female workers. Whether Croat, Serb, Finn, Italian or Scandinavian, males are intimidated by ladies in hardhats. (Was it a primordial male insecurity? Freudian? Dog-like territorial? Shrinks are left to puzzle the question. )
“Josie” (Nelson) is prime target of the miners’ slime ball tactics. The unwed “welfare mom” is in the vanguard of a new batch of Rosy the Riveters, still proving their mettle, now alongside old boyfriends, maybe ex-lovers — beer-guzzling guys in plaid shirts. Their barbarity toward “the weaker sex” is stupefying in the book Class Action, and devastating as cinema verite in North Country. Filth rules.
Was I shocked? No. Viscerally, I knew the screen portrayed the reality.
I’d been there, only twenty years earlier. Miners talked then, too, and perhaps always, about “their” whores above the plentiful Chestnut Street bars. Then-new Playboy centerfolds, racy as hell, air-brushed, decorated mine shack walls. Crudely drawn “artwork” was added with color crayons — fittingly, I thought, even then. Certainly no Holden Caulfield, I’d seen life full-blown early on, and the lewd graffiti, scrawled mine-wide, on posters, in the johns, on the sides even of railroad ore cars. Past was prologue to the future.
Striking me, in the book and film, is the complicity of (1) clueless mine management, in league with (a conspiracy?) (2) uncaring union bosses, in doing harm to employees and members, respectively. Culpable, too, are “Josie’s” co-workers, passive males and females. The latter group's see-no-evil refusals actually to join the class action litigation is not entirely surprising. Likely good folks did nothing. Old story.
Lawyer “Bill White” (Woody Harrelson) observes spot on: “Herds separated are easy prey.” ("White" is screenplay fiction. Two Title VII discrimination law-expert Twin City lawyers carried the case for Nelson and her co-plaintiffs.) Local townspeople’s tacit acceptance of injustice — yes, “nice” folks I grew up with — helped make the mine a Dante’s Inferno for terrified, trailblazing women.
“Josie,” upon seeing the trashing again of a dingy women’s room at the plant: “They can’t do this to us,” she fumes. Turning to local ex-hockey star "White," she finds prospects dim of winning justice in court, too, especially alone. “Even when you win,” he says, “you lose.”
The film’s compressed timeline makes too-short work of the real story. Lois Nelson et al. v. Eveleth Mines dragged on for 13 grueling years, during which the health of some plaintiffs suffered, including Nelson’s. Her friend –“Glory” in the film (Francis McDormand) — died of ALS. After a malicious “nuts and sluts” defense by the company’s hired-gun lawyers, Nelson and her co-plaintiffs finally won their case, on appeal, sharing in a $14 million award. Their battle was not about money, though, or confronting Neanderthals, and a town without pity. Theirs was a struggle against workplace abuses.
“Josie‘s“ film dad “Hank” (Richard Jenkins) has a redeeming line, shaking this ex-Ranger: "I’ve been a Ranger all my life," he tells a union hall of jeering workers, "and I’ve never been ashamed of it until now." On his daughter’s gutsy, principled stand, he adds, “…and I’ve never been as proud of my daughter as now.” (At his “getting it,” this soliloquy brings cheers in the theater.)
The film departs from real events thusly: No “White” (Harrelson). No ice hockey. No family friend to counsel “Josie‘s” son. She has no daughter. No rape in the high school. Anita Hill testifying on TV is a full six years away, a historical anomaly. (And gas is $1.79 in the film, compared with 1975’s buck-a-gallon. Oh well.)
The real “Josie” had her home invaded, tires slashed, a rape attempted on her, all not depicted on the screen. But most of the film’s outrages did occur, such as semen in women’s lockers. Photos did not lie even if the male miners did.
Faithful to my hometown, the film cuts frequently to that big white water tower, symbol perhaps of civilization, under which I played as a kid. It does have a feel of solidarity. The pallid fall and winter landscapes in the film are totally real, nearly surreal. One expects a white-tail deer to leap up, or a partridge to fly into my .410 shotgun range, against the film's backdrop of the massive MinnTac plant ("Pearson Taconite & Steel").
This R-rated epic pic sends an unambiguous message: Good people, “nice” folks, maybe your friends, your neighbors, your family and co-workers, might shirk in the face of injustice. Passivity does, indeed, prevail in working towns like Virginia (“Lowen”). Ordinary people defer to dignity-denying customs and dumb-ass mores. Doing what’s right, in short, is not always a breeze.
Happy endings are Hollywood, and North Country is no exception. In the final court scene, Harrelson (“White”) has a Perry Mason moment with a smirking male witness lying through his teeth. Suddenly the witness gets religion (or something) and blurts out the truth. Impossibly, “Josie’s” case is joined, on the very spot, by the courtroom audience, rising one by one, as if to expiate their collective guilt. Not true. Not even close! Even today, longtime grudges and misplaced antipathy attach themselves to Nelson and her friends, accused of money-grubbing or worse. One thing’s certain: Workplaces for women are safer, more congenial now, thanks to this landmark case. We, all of us, owe them bigtime.
On a five-star scale, I rate North Country four-and-a-half, demerited only for its stilted script. Look for this flick to be Oscar bait, though. Tough to deny a nomination, at least, for South African-born Charlize Theron. Sissy Spacek deserves a supporting look for her role as “Josie’s” mom. And don‘t rule out McDormand, without the silly Fargo accent, portraying “Josie’s” dying friend, the aptly-named “Glory.” (In real life, she died during the trial.)
Look for Oscar bids also for the gifted gal director, Niki Caro. She gets it right in this story of human rights. Jenkins and Harrelson are definitely long shots for hardware. This is a first-rate film. It will capture some of filmdom’s top awards. Ladies might bring a Kleenex box; it is a tear-jerker. Definitely worth a look at your favorite big-screen theater. Please, if you go, don't be too hard on my old hometown. It’s Everywhere USA.
Gary Larson is a retired association executive and former magazine editor. He is not the cartoonist of the same name. Larson is a regular columnist at Intellectual Conservative and a one-time film critic long ago in Fargo, N.D., of all places.
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