With Charlize Theron, Frances McDormand, Woody Harrelson, Michelle Monaghan,Richard Jenkins. Director: Niki Caro (2:03).R: Sequences involving sexual harassment - including violence and dialogue - andlanguage.

Such cases take years to develop, involve many people and are generally resolved in ways that are far more complicated than the headline over the news account of the final court ruling.

So, we accept condensed, glamorized versions of victories over a California power company ("Erin Brockovich"), an Oklahoma plutonium-processing plant ("Silkwood") and anti-union bosses in an Alabama mill ("Norma Rae").

And, in the tradition of those tales of crusading heroines, we accept the conveniently arranged events in "North Country," about a landmark sex-discrimination case brought against a Minnesota mining company by some of its female workers in the late 1980s.

I won't go into the details of that actual case, but it was big and it involved a lot more people than appear in the movie, which is directed by "Whale Rider's" talented Niki Caro. But if you need to reduce a cast of characters to a manageable heroine played by a glamorous movie star, you could do worse than Charlize Theron.

Fresh off an Oscar win for her uglied-down role as serial killer Aileen Wuornos in "Monster," Theron stars as Josey Aimes, a single mom who leaves an abusive relationship and moves back to her hometown in Minnesota. There, thanks to a Supreme Court ruling that forced American industry to allow women to fill jobs traditionally reserved for men, she goes to work in an iron-ore mine.

The job pays well enough for her to move out of her parents' house and away from the judgmental gaze of her father (Richard Jenkins from "Six Feet Under"), a veteran miner who works for the same company and who views his daughter with the same contempt as do the other men.

Besides the taunts, sexual vulgarisms and occasional physical assaults, she and her female co-workers find their lunch boxes stuffed with sex toys and their lockers and rest room walls smeared with feces, which they are forced to clean up.

In one hideous scene, some men shake and tip over a porta-potty, then roar with laughter when the frightened woman inside (Michelle Monaghan) spills out, covered with the toilet's contents.

Josey is a particular target because some of her male co-workers knew her in high school when she was recklessly promiscuous, and they treat her as if she deserves whatever they throw at her.

Theron, wearing little makeup but otherwise her slim, attractive self, proves with this performance that "Monster" was no fluke. She's the real deal, instilling Josey with a combination of vulnerability, pride and determination that forms a convincing composite of the women who dared to bring the company to its knees.

Here, Josey starts out all alone, except for her friend Glory (Frances McDormand, in another home-run performance), a veteran miner now rapidly deteriorating from Lou Gehrig's disease. The other women are too afraid of the men and of losing their jobs to join the cause - at least, at first.

Woody Harrelson does a solid turn as lawyer Bill White, a lingering ice-hockey legend in the community, who reluctantly agrees to lead Josey's cause into the legal system. The climactic courtroom scenes are contrived in a way that would be offensive if the women's beef wasn't so justified and their victory so deserved.

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