Sandra’s Miscellany

It’s not often that a movie annoys me, but this one did. I just watched it last night with the dSO — yes, I’m catching up on last year’s films — and we both felt like it had entirely missed the point.

If you can imagine a cliche in gender relations, this movie had it. Okay, that’s just bad writing, and yes, cliches are cliches for a reason. Most of the actors did their best with bad material, and most of the time they did okay, Woody Harrelson excepted. I just didn’t believe his character at all and he looked very uncomfortable in the role.

But the thing that really got to me was the subtext that flowed throughout the storyline. Josey Aimes kept saying she didn’t want to be taken care of, and that she didn’t need a man to do that for her, and then the following occurred:

• Her father saved her from a raucous and potentially violent union meeting.
• Her male lawyer (Harrelson) used his testosterone-dripping self to intimidate
• a male witness, whose belated honesty “saves” Josey from being labeled a slag.

So the dSO and I turned off the DVD player and wondered what the male writer of this screenplay thought he was doing. Men are still riding to the rescue, giving women their power, and generally sitting at the crux of a story that ultimately had nothing to them.

I know, it sounds weird to say that a movie about the first class-action sexual harrassment suit had nothing to do with men, but the story would have been stronger had Josey been the one pointing out to the union men that she and her female coworkers could be these guys’ mothers and wives and sisters and daughters, and did they really want them to be called bitches and whores? Or sexually molested in dark corners of the mining pit?

And why did Josey’s case turn on whether or not she’d been [spoiler alert] raped when she was in high school?[/spoiler alert]

Hello?

The thing is, the story should have been about women figuring out how to get their own power — using the law rather than retaliation, using their brains rather than their brawn — and making a difference for women struggling in such situations. Rather than being against men, they should have been for themselves.

And on top of the general annoyances, the mining manager and owner were portrayed as hypocritical, power-heavy idiots, when in fact, these guys probably honestly believed that they were doing the right thing. The thing about bigots is that they really do believe in what they’re doing, and think the reasons they’re doing it make perfect sense. It takes a strong shot of compassion (or head-banging) to get them to see something differently. But let’s not reduce them to one-dimensional villains. Please.

So I was extremely disappointed, and in some cases appalled. This film did everyone a disservice — the women, the men, the managers, the grunts in the pits, and most especially, the real-life women who stood up in 1989 and brought this lawsuit against the mining company where they worked.

Maybe the screenwriter should have stuck closer to the real story. If he had, he might have brought more respect, more humanity, and more dimensions to the film.