An Ideological Blessing

LOGGERHEADS

Directed by Tim Kirkman

NORTH COUNTRY

Directed by Niki Caro

Given the blue state/red state antinomies currently affecting film culture, Loggerheads is all the more surprising for being an independent movie that never caters to divisiveness. Neither does it have middle-of-the-road pretensions. It is a lovely and touching assessment of what binds people to each other (what Morrissey called "Glamorous Glue"). Director-writer Tim Kirkman examines the anxieties of sexual politics as they affect an HIV-positive man, Mark (Kip Pardue), a North Carolina preacher and his wife (Chris Sarandon and Tess Harper) and a single woman, Grace (Bonnie Hunt), still regretting the teenage decision to relinquish her baby for adoption.

Kirkman's script is something of a marvel-it's balanced, yet proves that some options are best not described as conservative or liberal. All his characters suffer misgivings about their choices and habits and this ambivalence is what makes the movie believable and good. The titular metaphor has two meanings: It refers to the breed of turtle Mark studies that, like him, returns to its place of birth before passing on to its next stage, and to the contentious religious and moral positions that threaten to rend America's social fabric. The way Kirkman looks at small things (Mark's blue bandana, the preacher and wife discussing a Bible verse, Grace's dashed hopes whenever she sees a young man of a certain age, a casual awareness of racism) leads to the realization of big issues just below the surface. (Kirkman's genuine perceptiveness views a barbershop as the locus of male identity, image and sometimes insecurity.)

"I believe people have a right to know who they are, where they come from," Grace is told. That line would announce taking sides in a George Clooney smug-fest; here it's got heart. As each character confronts his and her social indoctrination, they come to better understand who they are and what they need. No one rejects the culture that formed them as in movies of fake, heartless radicalism like Don Roos' hateful abortion comedy Happy Endings. Instead, Kirkman perceives the substance of everyday living. It's in the way Grace necessarily corrects her mother's (Michael Learned) presumptions-and then gets her own corrected; the way Mark tells a sex partner that he, in fact, loved going to church and got sustenance from it-although not in his parents' home; and the way Elizabeth (Harper) throws open the door of her husband's church but holds it steady-confirming personal frustration, struggle and independence.

Each protagonist's story is told through split time settings (not a yokel's simplicity) that should be appreciated in the "heartland" as well as New York and L.A. The emotions come together with a credibility that even Alain Resnais might endorse. Kirkman doesn't have a fashionably slick technique; in fact, he evokes the low-budget, sincere tone of Christian proselytizing movies and then subverts expectation. This happens primarily through the depth of the characterizations. Harper, Hunt and Learned have the emotional authenticity of small-town American white women. Pardue and the men in his orbit are true to a different gay male culture-an extension of the humanizing vision that Chris Sarandon pioneered so long ago in Dog Day Afternoon. Loggerheads has been made with careful sophistication.

Kirkman cuts from a kiss between Mark and a local motel owner to a crucifix atop a church steeple. The visual juxtaposition says more than the polemical discussion over a nativity scene and a neighbor's nude lawn sculpture. Like so much in Loggerheads, that transition offers an ideological blessing.

Beauty is such a burden for Charlize Theron. She thinks she'll only be taken seriously by playing hardluck women in movies based on the stories of real-life hardluck women. Theron's new film North Country follows her soporific Nazi-era bio pic Head in the Clouds and her repugnant serial-killer bio pic Monster. Different miseries but the same agenda: Watch Charlize suffer. She may look like a Hollywood sexpot, but she's no doormat. Theron's heroines refuse to be passive victims and in a new millennial twist, they reject compassion-as if feminism meant Female Movie Stars First! It's a loathsome career philosophy.

As Josey Aimes, a battered Minnesota wife and mother, Theron leaves her husband and takes a job in a mine where she suffers more abuse and then initiates a class-action suit for sexual harassment. "Inspired" by a true story, Theron and director Niki Caro don't have to follow rules of truth, fairness or art; they simply push post-feminist self-righteousness with crude storytelling techniques that only a fool would find persuasive. (Caro made the dreadful Whale Rider, which dulled and infantilized the same feminist and ethnic issues that were powerfully realized in Once Were Warriors.)

Theron and Caro reduce the recent history of women's labor struggle and domestic violence to oversimplified melodrama and misunderstood sexual politics. Everyone at the mine is wrong-in fact, Neanderthal-except Josey. Frances MacDormand plays her only friend, Glory Dodge, a doomed shop steward (she winds up useless from Lou Gehrig's disease). In all, this is the most infuriatingly unfair portrait of an American community since? Monster. Josey's surrounded by cruel bosses, gorgon female co-workers, brutish male co-workers, and even her father (Richard Jenkins) still blames her for getting pregnant as a teenager and now invading working men's territory.

North Country's unsubtle emotional manipulation is nauseating when not laughable. Every time Josey turns on a TV set, it broadcasts the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings. ("He refered to the size of his own penis being larger than normal.") Her own day in court features the cross-examination of a villain as ludicrously clichéd as the one Woody Allen satirized in Bananas. ("Yes! Yes! I lied!") How did the great cinematographer Chris Menges get involved in this mess? He must have confused Theron and Caro's self-aggrandizing approach to social justice with the humanist realism of the Ken Loach films with which he began his career.

Movie liberalism needs an overhaul.

But there are also scary apolitical motives at work in North Country. This is the same egotism that besets other contemporary bio pics. Personal history is now being used as a vehicle for actors to show off. David Strathairn's rictus portrayal of Edward R. Murrow is as one-note as Philip Seymour Hoffman's Truman Capote; both culminate in a similar lack of empathy. Thus, Theron's Josey feels for no one, not even her long-suffering, old-fashioned mother (Sissy Spacek); yet she's made superior to everyone. These films are only about exhibitionism which vain actors mistake for honesty. North Country has none of the ambivalence that enriches Loggerheads. Instead, it brandishes a soundtrack of Bob Dylan songs-retro liberalism that returns Dylan to the pigeonhole of political presumption he wrestled out of (incidentally, the only dramatic arc in Scorsese's recent Dylan bio-doc.) Theron and Caro calculate like red state/blue state agitators. Horribly condescending, they put working-class people in the dark ages of social progress, and only seen rising-up to salute Theron in an insulting I-Am-Spartacus ending. Sissy Spacek's quiet conviction in a couple of scenes results from a career with real moral authority such as Theron may never attain. Theron's insistence on playing vengeful, grandstanding masochists suggests she hasn't learned the real meaning of beauty.