Not a lot new here, just Silkwood meets The Accused, but Charlize Theron turns in an interesting performance showing that the same “mad as hell and I’m not gonna take this anymore!” energy she gave Aileen Wuornos in Monster can be directed towards more positive ends. Frances McDormand offers a stripped down version of her Margie in Fargo.

I love Niki Caro’s direction, and the gender stuff isn’t quite as ridiculously black and white as I feared it would be early on (ie. ‘men are just pigs and women are just victims!’). It kinda falls into a lot of clichés but it’s hard not to get choked up in the final courtroom scene when you think how that unprecedented moment must have really felt. Like Good Night, And Good Luck., this movie has a very simple message, to speak up without fear, and it’s very well conveyed. Very good accent work all round, too – and though, as is often the case, I don’t know what this particular accent is “supposed to” sound like, what I mean is it all gels together and sounds, I don’t know, ‘right’, from actor to actor.

Finally, I would love to see Richard Jenkins nominated for Best Supporting Actor for this movie. He’s been in so many movies over the years (usually as guys called Hank or Walter, lol) and he’s always fantastic, but here as Theron’s father he goes to some seriously heavy places.

Definitely a movie I’ll watch again, and between only this and Whale Rider I can confidently count Niki Caro among my favourite directors.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 30th, 2006 at 7:56 am in 4 hearts, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.