Starring: Charlize Theron, Jeremy Renner, Frances McDormand

7 out of 10 stars

Even with a stellar lead performance by Charlize Theron, North Country is a movie ultimately unable to overcome a trifurcated split personality that makes it part earnest issue movie, part effective family drama, and part opportunity for a number of movie stars to dress up like poor people. Director Niko Caro (Whale Rider), making her American feature debut, strives mightily to personalize this tale of the first sexual harassment suit ever filed in the United States, and takes every opportunity she can to shift it away from lecturing its audience and move it towards a quiet yet powerful character study of a family and community in crisis. But no matter how hard she fights, North Country is almost duty-bound to adhere to the tenets that have shaped every issue-oriented movie from Guess Who's Coming to Dinner to Norma Rae to The Accused to Erin Brockovich - lessons are to be learned, adversity is to be overcome, and humanity is to be raised. That said, despite the strictures that confine this movie, it's a well-made, effective drama that lingers longer that you might expect.

North Country, by its mere nature and subject matter, falls into the territory of movies that are well-meaning but not fun, movies that feel more like an obligation than entertainment, that mean to illuminate and teach first and be work of art second. The unspoken king of this genre is, of course, Schindler's List, a powerful, gripping, important movie that very few people are going to watch more than once, and with the exception of the Seinfeld cast, most people are going to feel guilty for saying so. North Country has the same hurdle to overcome - no one's going to say "Let's go see the sexual harassment drama!" - and attempts to do so by crystallizing its issues in the person of Josey Aimes (Theron), a hardscrabble Minnesota woman enduring torturous working conditions at male-dominated mining company. Caro and screenwriter Michael Seitzman aggressively focus their story on Josey and her tribulations, and to their credit they never sink into the trap that bogus issue movies (like, say, Beyond Borders) fall into, which is holding up something horrific happening to a human being while saying, "How terrible, how terrible!" Instead, every insult, blow, and degradation is deeply felt by their heroine, and thanks to Theron, it's felt by every member of the audience as well.

That abuse starts in the opening frames of the film and never lets up, as the first look at Josey involves her staring apprehensively out the window at a car barreling up her snow-filled driveway; the next moment, she's broken and bloodied on the floor, the victim of her husband's rage. Packing up her kids, she seeks refuge at her parents' house, where her mother (Sissy Spacek) blames the assault on her son-in-law's joblessness and her father (Richard Jenkins) asks if she's the recipient of a black eye because she's been sleeping with another man. That's just the beginning of the bad treatment she'll be getting from men. Lured by the prospect of earning enough money to buy her own home, Josey takes on grueling work at the local mining company (astonishingly photographed by Chris Menges), and is encouraged by her friend Glory (Frances McDormand), who instructs her to grow "gator skin" if she's to put up with the heinous working conditions. Verbal epithets turn into overt taunting, followed by physical intimidation, sexual insults, and the unwanted attentions of her former high school boyfriend Bobby (Jeremy Renner), who now lords over her a sexual power that he was incapable of expressing when they were teenagers.

This is just the tip of the iceberg of what Josey has to endure - it's a litany of horrifying blows, both physical and mental, from the sex toys in lunchboxes to the excrement smeared on the walls of the women's locker room. The hostility in the air isn't just limited to Josey's working environment; there's a seismic shift afoot throughout the country, embodied by the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings on Capitol Hill, endlessly broadcast on TV. Having been pushed around enough in her short lifetime, Josey takes her complaints to the head of her company, only to be presented with a polite waiver of her two weeks' notice and a grim smile. Refusing to quit, she soldiers on, until a physical assault (more like attempted rape) by Bobby finally forces her to quit. After that, it's a trip to entreat the local hockey-champ-turned-lawyer (Woody Harrelson) to take her case; then she must persuade a judge to hear the complaint, and then find two more plaintiffs to keep the case alive, and then undergo excruciating testimony about every aspect of her sexual past.

It's an exhausting road for both Josey and the audience, but Caro keeps the movie firmly focused on Theron, and it's a testament to her charisma as an actress that you are drawn in to Josey's plight and begin to develop a personal stake in it. The way Caro and Seitzman build up Josey's story too is shrewdly done, as insult is piled upon insult, creating a mountain of wearying, terrifying force that slowly but inexorably weighs Josey down until, from both exhaustion and anger, she's unwilling to take it anymore. To leaven this unceasing agony, the movie focuses on Josey's personal life as well, mostly her tenuous interaction with her parents and the prickly relationship she has with her teenage son (Thomas Curtis). Despite the fact that half of these scenes seem to be given over to putting Theron in a number of post-Flashdance outfits and tarting her up in eyeshadow and a shag haircut, they're the strongest part of the movie, demonstrating the toll Josey's job takes on everything around her, and how what won't will kill her only makes her stronger and more willing to fight. And Theron plays these scenes for all they're worth, and then some. In fact, it's not the scenes in which she's victimized that stick out, it's the quieter ones where she buys her kids a real breakfast at a local pancake house or teaches her son to drive her pick-up that demonstrate how good, how smart, and how nuanced an actress she is.

Ultimately, though, North Country falls prey to a need to stack the deck in favor of its heroine - Josey is a supposed bad girl, but a tragedy from her past exonerates her previous behavior, which shouldn't need exonerating in the first place - and one too many melodramatic plot devices (McDormand's character is diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's Disease, for one) tend to cook up what's already a compelling, legitimate story. The one traditional scene that works the best involves Theron and Jenkins at a union meeting, where Josey is vilified by the local members, and Jenkins finally takes a stand for the daughter he's been ashamed of all his life. In just a few moments - Jenkins' hand on Theron's as he asks her to hand over a microphone, his stammering words, her barely-masked fear - North Country creates a history that bad '90s clothes and wood-paneled low-income homes and pages of court testimony can't begin to convey. Were the movie made of more moments like that, it would approach true greatness.