(2005) Sometimes it takes a lot of public shaming before people can be persuaded to overcome their individual fears to do what's right. Inspired by Clara Bingham and Laura Leedy Gansler's book, Class Action: The Landmark Case That Changed Sexual Harassment Law, director Niki Caro's film dramatizes the first class-action law suit for sexual harassment in the US. This filmanthropic Warner Brothers release received financial backing from Participant Productions, which has provided funding for more than three dozen movies as part of its social-action campaign, accompanied by Bob Dylan's songs.

In 1989 in northern Minnesota, up in the Mesabi Iron Range, Josey Aimes (Charlize Theron) picks herself up off the floor with a bloodied face from her husband Wayne's most recent beating and leaves with her two children, Sammy and Karen, to move in with her parents, Hank (Richard Jenkins) and Alice (Sissy Spacek). Interspersed with her story are scenes of her in the courtroom being cross-examined by Miss Leslie Conlin, representing Pearson Taconite and Steel, the company for whom she worked before quitting and pressing charges for sexual harassment.

Ashamed of Josey, her father, a life-long ranger for Pearson, assumes his daughter's husband, who's out of work, caught her in bed with another man. Josey while still in high school became pregnant at 16 with her son, whose feelings about his mother are conflicted; she has admitted to not knowing who the father might have been.

Inspired by her friend Glory (Frances McDormand), who drives a truck for the mines and is the only female union rep, Josey quits her job washing hair at a beauty salon and gets a job with Pearson, where men outnumber females 30-1.

From the first day in the mines, Josey and a handful of other young women get the message that "some things are for men and some things are for women," and working in the mines is only for men. On a tour a ranger passes the women, spitting out an obscenity, just as Arlen Pavich, the mine manager says to them: "Ear protection, ladies." In addition to nasty comments and instances of intimidation, some of the guys grab a feel, scrawl crude graffiti, and put sex toys in lockers and lunch pails. After Glory's fight to get Porta-Janes for the women, a few of the men turn one over with 19-year-old Sherry inside.

"Take it like a man," one ranger advises; even Glory tells Josie to "get gator skin." A nemesis from high school, Bobby Sharp, confronts her in the powder room alone and physically assaults her; his wife publicly accuses her of being a whore at a hockey game, warning her against further messing with Bobby. For the first time in her life with this job Josey has earned enough money for her own home and independence, but the harassment is all but unbearable.

After her unsuccessful attempts to organize the other women into opposition, she goes to Donald Pearson, the company president, alone only to be told that if she doesn't want to resign on the spot she must cease stirring up female workers, sleeping with company men, and concentrate on improving her job performance. Frustrated with the lack of support, she eventually quits and appeals to Bill White (Woody Harrelson), an attorney recently returned to his home state from New York City, to take her case.

At first he demurs, explaining that law suits are rarely satisfying: "Even when you win, you don't win." The judge agrees to a hearing of a class-action law suit if Josey can find at least two other women to corroborate her complaints. References and television scenes of the Anita Hill's accusations against Clarence Thomas punctuate the drama.

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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