Review of North Country (2005) by Alastairevans — 24 Mar 2011

The movie is terribly contrived. The story is great. The movie was not so great. And I believe it had a lot to do with the poor direction. It was a good story that would have better been told in the hands of another director. To see what Francis Ford Coppola did with Rainmaker and then to watch this movie is about how the entire Mining company would have felt at the end of the trial: utter disappointment.

The court scenes were a mess. The acting was good but I couldn't pay attention to it because I was so lost by the direction on the movie.

Steven Soderbergh's Erin Brokovich was much better than this movie. Though important to the storyline, the fecal, scatological, crass and disgusting behaviour by the Male miners was used as a crutch by Caro. She simply leaned on it too much. It would have been move rewarding to give the viewer more depth rather than lean on the Male behaviour in the the mines. We are not all moved by scat. A touch of real human emotion would have told much more than a prolonged scene with a ****.

At the end of the movie I still couldn't really feel for Josey Aimes and not due in any part to the real life woman, Lois Jensen, or the acting by Charlize Theron, who was great. It was Caro's inability to focus on what mattered in the story. What was contrived? Josey's relationship with her father, lawyer and children, mostly. Though most interaction between the protagonist and Glory made me sick, sicker than the virtually ubiquitous smut. This movie SHOULD HAVE been more absorbing. And the ending...just like my own review's ending...plop.