Workin' in a coal mine

Oscar season forces us to ignore the better angels of our nature. It took two nominations from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences to compel me to watch a movie I already knew was foul. North Country takes Norma Rae, Karen Silkwood, Erin Brokovich, and Anita Hill, locks them in a Port-A-Potty, then topples it so that they're covered in piss and shit (fun fact: this happens to one of the film's hapless woman coal miners!). This is the kind of film in which the men all flash missing teeth, glower around a facefful of coal dust, and shout vituperations like "This bitch wants to take every single swingin' dick!" so that the audience understands that Sexism Still Exists. North Country makes Crash seem like Grand Illusion.

Lots of good actors are wasted. Sissy Spacek has one quietly pungent moment in which she lets her husband know that she ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more. Channelling Fargo's Marge Gunderson and her Wise Mom in Almost Famous, Frances McDormand is halfway successful at creating an original character. Unfortunately it reminds you of other movie characters, not a life; then she gets Lou Gehrig's Disease and talks through one of those larynx voiceboxs. That's the end of her performance. As Theron's father, Richard Jenkins of "Six Feet Under" fame comes closest to truth, notably in the scene in which he admits he doesn't like his daughter very much.

I don't get Charlize Theron. Yeah, she's purty and all, and she's got some talent, but her career is a textbook example of a fallacy every beautful actor or actress must commit, a fallacy which we will henceforth refer to as the Lange-Pitt Syndrome: plagued by misgivings about their looks, they accept any/every role which suppresses their greatest asset (that's what happens when the studio system collapses: a movie star's narcissism overwhelms his/her common sense). Theron was charming in an unforced way in Woody Allen's Celebrity (she was the only human being in the film) and movie-star-glamorous in The Italian Job. In Monster, her Oscar-endoresed turn, the director didn't give Theron anything interesting to do except make cretin faces at the camera. Moreover, she was too conscious of the pancake makeup that turned her into a murderous banshee; at times she seemed to be impersonating a beautiful woman's rage when she's suddenly made ugly (Tom Cruise endured similar raptures in Vanilla Sky). Critics are ever susceptible to rewarding actorly exertions.