The courtroom scenes in North Country, as is so often the case, really expose how shopworn the moviemakers' narrative artistry is. Jenson's attorneys wisely preserved the record of the damages phase of the suit in anticipation of their appeal to the Eighth Circuit. Josey's attorney, by contrast, tries to break one of the harassers on the stand, to make him admit Josey was raped as she claims. The dirty little sneak breaks, of course, turning this landmark suit into an episode of Perry Mason. There's no whisper of sealing Josey's rape testimony or of clearing the courtroom, of course, because the structure of melodrama demands that her humiliation and vindication be as public as possible. Josey's attorney then proceeds to give a speech during which Glory, apparently having heard it was open-mike night at the District Court, rolls in to croak her newfound faith in Josey's cause from her wheelchair. Finally, the crowd in the courtroom, having learned the same lesson at the same time in a pandemic of enlightenment, stands to show solidarity with Josey. Even if this stand-up climax were at all likely, it would be a bad thing--we don't want courts making decisions by reference to audience applause. (The staging is so ridiculous they might as well have done a sports-stadium wave.)

Naturalism is the narrative genre that describes what is. The extensive factual and legal record in the Jenson case would seem to make the moviemakers' work easy. But they don't just want to present Jenson's case, they want to put it over, and so they turn to romance, which, in stark contrast to naturalism, begins with an ideal and constructs a symbolic demonstration in which that ideal triumphs thanks to the "indomitable spirit" of the virtuous hero. (That's why Pat Kosmach ends up rechristened "Glory" and Lois Jenson ends up with the bull's-eye-seeking surname "Aimes.") In this way romance has something of a ritual effect--we come to witness the inevitable victory of good over evil. We're consoled by it precisely because it isn't like what we see in our daily experience, the way we might be consoled in church by the promise of the day of judgment. That's the theory, anyway, but romance lives up to this theory only to the extent it embodies commonly and deeply held spiritual values. Anything short of that reeks of complacent fantasizing.

The long, tortured, uncertain, and physically depleting course that Jenson v. Eveleth Taconite Co. took through the judicial system over 14 years simply doesn't involve a situation conducive to romance storytelling. And at its core it's not about commonly held spiritual values, but just the opposite--it's about a shift in mores, both among the mineworkers and their families, and among the corporate management. If there's an epic subject, that would be it, and it's such a tricky one that even the federal courts got tangled up trying to sort it out. As Bingham and Gansler record, McNulty as Special Master in the damages phase of the trial was