The Old School Lunch

Remember the urinals that were made in the shape of a woman’s mouth? Now this.

[How hard is it to be a movie critic for a newspaper? Apparently not very hard.]

North Country has been out for a while and I just got around to seeing it.

And it’s easy to see why it gets a lot of cheap attacks from movie critics because it follows Charlize Theron’s Oscar winning performance in Monster. Take this review, for example, from Portland Tribune critic Dawn Taylor:

Charlize Theron gives an admirable performance as Josey Aimes, a fictionalized version of the woman behind a pioneering class-action lawsuit that won millions of dollars for 14 women who had suffered appalling treatment on the job at a Minnesota mine. But it’s a performance that sadly flounders, because it’s wedged smack in the middle of a movie that fails horribly at telling a human story.

After leaving an abusive spouse and moving in with her parents (Richard Jenkins and Sissy Spacek), Josey is pleased to get a good, albeit grueling, union job at the mine. But as soon as she arrives, she finds that for the female workers it’s a veritable carnival of misogyny Ñ catcalls, insults, dirty words smeared in feces on the women’s locker room walls, offensive items hidden in lockers and lunchboxes.

With each successive indignity, one waits for Josey to grow a spine and fight back. And, finally, in typical American fashion, she does Ñ she quits her job in tears and then sues the company. Very empowering, that.

With the exception of some terrific work by Frances McDormand and Sean Bean as Josey’s supportive friends, every frame of “North Country” bangs you over the head with its demand that you see it as a Very Important Movie. It’s not. It’s just an overblown, overlong soap opera about a woman who never learns how to truly stand up for herself. But oh, that scent of Oscar is delicious, isn’t it?

Taylor conveniently forgets to mention the physical and sexual assault that women in the film faced. I don’t know how one forgets a pretty brutal scene in which Theron’s character is thrown to the ground and then a male mill worker lunges on top of her and then sexually assaults her, but I digress.

My biggest beef with this shit review is that Taylor says that the film is a story about “a woman who never learns to stand up for herself” because “she quits her job in tears and then sues the company. Very empowering, that.”

Again, if you actually watch the film you’ll notice that Theron’s character tells the other men to stop, talks to the supervisor about it (who immediately tells her to basically shut up), talks to the other women about banding together and talking to the “Boss” of the company and when they’re scared for their jobs and afraid of retaliation, she goes to talk to the boss herself. Again, like the supervisor, she’s told to “shut up and quit if you have a problem.” At this point, I believe, she’s physically and sexually assaulted in the aforementioned scene and then she quits. And yes, she quits in tears, which the reviewer suggests is the character just being too emotional.

Then she moves to sue the company and after some struggling with the other women and men in the company, a class action is formed.

I don’t know what the reviewer thought would be Theron’s character standing up for herself. What was she supposed to do? Take a gun and shoot the men there? Talk to the HR person there about the sexual harassment laws and workplace policies? Oh, that’s right, most of those policies weren’t there until after the class action…

Taylor is what I would call one of those folks who is so joyously cynical about people suing other people that she’s willing to call bullshit on anyone who does. Since she offers no other suggestions for “standing up” we have to assume that she seriously meant something like “blow the entire place up with a massive gas leak” or “just hurl sexist comments to men and slap them on the ass or grab their balls.” Because, you know, that will put the offending men in their place! That’ll change things!

That’s not to suggest that I think it’s pointless for women, when on the receiving end of sexist insults and comments, to say sexist insult and comments back to men. It is however, a completely bullshit “take it and if the kitchen’s too hot for you then get out” type of mentality. It also suggests that the culture men have created where that type of verbal abuse goes on is completely acceptable and, of course, normal.

Pretty interesting.

I’m kinda surprised that it’s the Big H doing this. I wonder if other schools do this and if so, it took Harvard to finally make it in the press? Is this even press worthy?