Charlize Theron in North Country.

Photo: 78th Academy Awards®

This year, Charlize Theron’s crusading miner-activist in North Country garnered an Oscar nomination, following in the footsteps of such Academy-lauded turns as Sally Field’s in Norma Rae (1979), Meryl Streep’s in Silkwood (1983), and Julia Roberts’ in Erin Brockovich (2000). While Theron didn’t win (in part because it’s been only two years since she took home a statue for her portrayal of another kind of working-class activist, murderous prostitute Aileen Wuornos), the nod still raises the question: What does Hollywood see in poor women fighting the establishment to save the environment?

The women in these four films are themselves forces of nature, righting man-made wrongs, with the emphasis on “man.” All inhabit the American heartland, from Oklahoma to Minnesota, from Alabama to small-town California. Each is based on a real woman: in Silkwood and Erin Brockovich, without a name change; in Norma Rae and North Country, with thin fictionalization. And all embody a lefty version of the American dream, pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and their idealism, ennobled while ennobling through their fights.

The struggles of Silkwood and Brockovich were, of course, directed against forces of pollution and contamination. But even the fights of Field’s character — toward union organizing, with an emphasis on ensuring better working conditions — and Theron’s — against sexual harassment, but, significantly, in a strip mine where the assault on human dignity is multidimensional — wind up being environmental in both literal and larger senses.

North Country, the most recent of these films, offers a good read on where we stand as a culture. It suggests that three-quarters of the way through the Bush years, a mass audience can still identify with a woman taking on environmental, social, and economic issues, albeit in a relatively restrained manner. The only one of the four movies directed by a woman — New Zealander Niki Caro, whose previous feature was the immensely successful Whale Rider, another tale of female empowerment — North Country is set in the not-so-distant past, the ’80s, making its heroine’s struggle seem simultaneously historical and immediate.

The film — which is, in many ways, completely safe, since few would want to defend sexual harassment — finds its greatest resonance in imagery that has little direct connection to Theron’s character’s struggle, and everything to do with her impoverished state and environment. Its bleak northern landscape, emphasized in a long opening helicopter shot, is a natural correlative of its dominant human-made image, the wintry iron mine in which Theron’s Josey Aimes struggles so hard to work.

The mining company’s corporate pantheon, whom we encounter with Josey in a Minneapolis boardroom, takes but a few minutes of screen time to reveal themselves as suit-and-tied monsters, humiliating Josey and her modest idealism as fully as the working-class stiffs who overturn women’s port-a-potties (with the women in them) or scrawl the rawest of cartoons on their lockers. Ultimately, North Country flashes back to the literal rape mirrored in each of Josey’s subsequent instances of sexual harassment, yet these acts are themselves mirrored on a larger scale by the company’s rape of the land. Though the suits and their complicity are little more than stereotypical stick figures here, their sliminess oozes over the landscape by implication, almost making North Country an overtly environmentalist film — though the subject is never directly addressed.

The personal is certainly political in North Country, and the reform embodied by Josey — as with her big-screen predecessors — is a necessary corrective, not merely to injustice but to men meddling in the realm of the traditionally “feminine”: the earth, Gaia, nature. North Country and its movie sisters express an attitude that’s at core deeply schematic and split, dividing male from female, artificial from natural, rich from poor. (That split might be reflected in Hollywood’s male counterparts to Josey and company as well — if there were any. Male social crusaders tend to get their own movies, directed by and starring themselves; see Michael Moore, Morgan Spurlock’s Supersize Me, and even an early ecologically minded predecessor, Bill Mason’s Waterwalker.)

If that, in turn, seems to be just “how things are,” an embodiment of natural forces that can’t possibly be questioned, perhaps it’s really just an indication of what a profoundly conservative — not in the best meanings of the word — culture we currently inhabit.

The same Oscar show that included Theron’s nomination also included a montage of scenes from past Hollywood “issue movies” in this, a year of multi-issue nominees. The message was clear: Hollywood’s always led a progressive, reformist agenda. But Hollywood’s most truly radical films, those of the late ’60s and ’70s, had more in their sights than mere reform.

The analyses of American society — including attitudes toward greed, environmental devastation, and yes, women’s roles — posited by films such as Bonnie and Clyde (1967, directed by Arthur Penn), McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971, directed by 2006 honorary Oscar winner Robert Altman, still heroically defiant after all these years), and Chinatown (1974, directed by Roman Polanski and anticipating North Country‘s linkage of personal and landscape assault) speak to a vastly more far-reaching vision of the need for transformation of American society. It’s a vision in which mere reform is both insufficient and impossible.

Norma Rae and Silkwood fit that pattern, the former climaxing with the galvanizing image of its heroine’s defiant “Union” placard waving — clearly intended as a modest call to arms — and the latter leaving us with the unsettling ambiguity surrounding its title character’s death, and the question of whether she was killed by those she opposed. By contrast, Erin Brockovich ends in an atmosphere that led the New York Times‘ A.O. Scott to sarcastically brand it “the feel-good movie of the year,” and North Country wraps up on a modest note of domesticity and reconciliation.

The more recent heroines are compromised figures, but Hollywood has made sure they are still “successful.” They and their movies aspire to a kind of safe, middle-class respectability. An understandable goal, perhaps — but it’s hardly enough to inspire the social change needed to combat global devastation.

Image: walmartmovie.com.

Director/producer Robert Greenwald adopted a similar strategy last year with his Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism, but that work never scored the 7,000-plus play dates the new film claimed for its premiere week. The sort of distribution Greenwald has conceived and effected here is truly what’s revolutionary about Wal-Mart, positing a whole new way of reaching audiences. Cutting out the theater means one of two things (or, in this case, both): that sufficient theaters can’t be booked for the film to reach its intended audience, or that the film’s impact is not likely to be diminished too much by a less than full-scale setting.

A grand setting has been essential to the impact of many other politically committed documentaries. But the record-breaking commercial success of Fahrenheit 9/11, for instance, ultimately meant little in terms of its intent when George Bush took the 2004 election. And the relative success of such recent strong and progressively intended documentaries as The Weather Underground, The Corporation, and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room served largely to stoke the embers of a radical movement that once seemed extinguished. These films all laid claim to greater artistic vision and aspiration than Wal-Mart, which is intended not as a film so much as an organizing tool.

There’s little point, then, in dwelling on its deficiencies as a work of even political art or propaganda: the overly cued, emotion-triggering soundtrack; the somewhat scattershot editing; the made-for-TV, attention-deficit-based attack. Greenwald talks to bitter current and ex-employees, and uses footage of corporate head Lee Scott’s speeches to represent the company’s views. There’s no interjection by a narrator, just thoughts and stories countered with Wal-Martian images — footage gathered throughout the U.S. and in other parts of the world. Wal-Mart is not a work for the ages, it’s a work for the moment. And that moment, the filmmakers hope, began last week.

Robert Greenwald at the helm.

Photo: walmartmovie.com.

There’s not much question — and many viewers won’t need this film to confirm — that Wal-Mart is a malignant force in American and world society. The list of its corporate crimes, direct and indirect, are well adumbrated by Greenwald: the devastation of downtowns and small businesses in its wake; the conscious and severe exploitation of workers (called, in language we’ve come to accept but that George Orwell might have anticipated, “associates”); the flagrant disregard of community and environmental standards and concepts; the creation and maintenance of overseas sweatshops; the economic blackmailing of American communities to give the corporation huge tax breaks; the virtually systematic discrimination against women and minorities within the company; the obscene profiteering of its corporate founders and officers; the downright pathological union-busting; the callow disregard of customers’ safety. (An opposing perspective is being shopped around in the new Why Wal-Mart Works and Why That Makes Some People C-R-A-Z-Y.)

To say, as some have, that Wal-Mart “just does capitalism better” is to call for a Marxist revolution, though that is seldom the intent of those who say it. As it is, Wal-Mart functions as a perfect metaphor for the ills of capitalist and consumerist society, its unprecedented success the ironic proof, it would seem, of the system’s corruption.

Is it for better or for worse that Greenwald in no way broadens the scope of his argument to the rest of the culture of greed? The film’s sole references to other corporations are to note Bill Gates’ charitable generosity in favorable comparison to the Walton family’s astonishing stinginess, and to note the company’s superiority in growth rate to the troubled Kmart and others. Wal-Mart is intended to overthrow not an economic system but an economic emperor, and it closes with a triumphant recapitulation of the municipalities, towns, and counties that have refused to offer tax breaks or stopped stores from opening. Defeating this onerous giant can be and has been done, the video assures us, focusing on two divergent communities that succeeded — predominantly white, upper-middle-class Chandler, Ariz., and predominantly black, working-class Inglewood, Calif. — and referring us to websites dedicated to the fight.

The real reviews of Wal-Mart won’t be in ’til we find out how much its screenings eventually stop the ogre from growing. But if Wal-Mart itself is halted, won’t there be another despot in its place? What do we know of the labor and other practices of Target, Kohl’s, and all the other Wal-Mart wannabes? This video’s signature “Evil Smiley” figure, a take-off on Wal-Mart’s smiley face, is a far cry from “Workers of the world, unite!” But in fact, there’s likely more reason than ever for workers of the world to unite, since the global economy now entangles the have-nots of all nations in a worldwide web the likes of which IWW’s founders could never have imagined.

Of course, a thorough overhaul of the economic system is well beyond the apparent intent of this movie and its director, and of the working poor it champions, for whom a great victory would be gained with merely a livable wage and decent working conditions. But could these 7,000-plus screenings be the harbinger of something larger? Marx posited the inevitable downfall of capitalism, perhaps anticipating the concept of ecocide, if not foretelling immediate world history. Could it be that resistance to Wal-Mart is the first peal of a nearly inconceivably distant death knell?