Woman Vs. Nature

From the moment one sees June (Lisa Eichhorn) the heroine of Wildrose, hacking away at a tree stump in the woods, one realizes that this is one of those films out to defend that mythic territory of American folklore known as rugged individualism. Wildrose, like Country and Heartland, attempts to highlight Man vs. Nature as a dying theme in American culture. These films constitute a new breed of Back-To-America Realism that revives the creation myth of the endangered individual as the prototypical American.

Wildrose is the story of a young woman's struggle to maintain her independence from society and men in a small mining town on Minnesota's Mesabi Iron Range. The narrative conspicuously lacks pretension, prefering a plain-spoken unselfconscious style that cares little for cosmetic surfaces. Unlike last year's Country, Wildrose's authenticity relies less on cultural drama than on a coarse documentary-like artlessness that is assaulting at times with its "realistic" zeal. Instead of Jessica Lange courageously battling hurricanes and mortgage collectors in western-chic jeans, one has a homely June going off to the mines in her hardhat and baggy overalls. No glamorous hardships here.

The candid shots of life on the range aren't pretty. While postcard-stills of the sleeping town before sunrise frequently interrupt the screen, the camera focuses for the most part on relentlessly exposing the routine exhaustion of life in the pits: from the hard day's labor in the mines to the hardluck boozers in the C & W saloon. The tight angles force the audience into contact, and often an unsettling intimacy, with the heavy mundaneness of lower middle class life. One has scenes of a locker room echoing with weeping after lay-off notices, the crew trading sandwiches on their lunchbreak, a monstrous dumptruck heaving its load in barren industrialized zones.

All of this is narrated with a "this is life" complacency that offers no conclusions. It is not even art-for-art's sake, but mundanity for the sake of... who knows? Impressions of community life in the small mining town--a carnival-like communion service where wafers are taken to accordion music, a songfest saluting beer, a fishing picnic where one woman asks June "have you ever seen a sucker?"--take on, for all their sociological insights, a grotesquely pointless irreality. Why suddenly does a marching band parade down Main Street? The impersonal curiosity with which these studies in "naturalism" are offered conveys a sense of uneasy intimacy similar to going through a stranger's family album.

The flatness of the people's lives in Wildrose matches the flatness of the film's characters. The small town is populated with a familiar cast of bar sleazes, unemployed drunks, old women watching from their front porches, and male chauvinist breadwinners who insist that a woman's place is in the home. The mine crew, affectionately referred to as "pit-rats", sit around cracking obscene jokes and generally giving June a hard time for doing "a man's work." While sexism is a given condition of the hard lifestyle that June assumes, it is repeatedly a one-sided charge, an excuse for blaming degraded lifestyles on social oppression. It's never clear why June insists on making it down in the pits not with the men but as "one of the men" in the first place, or why we are supposed to sympathize with this life's ambition. The film seems to work against its own supposed stand for women's rights. Walking past a row of leering truck-drivers, June's female companion offers in smiling, taunting contempt, "Hello, assholes," reducing her to their level. The issue of socio-economic progress degenerates into feminism at its iron-fisted worst: men are pitiful brutes.

Even this ideological struggle, however, soon collapses into a predictable triangle: the fiercely-independent June, her caring but impotent lover, and jealous abusive ex-husband. One can't help feeling disappointed when June interrupts the love-making scene with the excuse-confession that her husband used to beat her. For all her proud determination, she seems less a heroine than yet another victim of an early marriage and thwarted ambitions. Somehow, this is supposed to be the justifying grounds for transforming her misogyny and defensive cry of "leave me alone!" into a model for all independent women. In general, too much time is spent dwelling on June's "scarred" past, reducing her struggles to a level of trivial, uninspiring complacency. The violent scene of domestic confrontation with the abusive alcoholic Billy resembles a forgettable Police Story episode with its drawn out hyperrealism.

If there is a redeeming element of human interest, it is the people of the Mesabi Iron Range, who play themselves as the descendants of the Finnish town settlement. There are some wonderful scenes of June's visits with an ancient Finnish woman, picking berries, relaxing in an outdoor sauna, and sharing a mutual unspoken wisdom in a language of their own. The incongruity of these visits, far from distracting, offers moments of genuine refreshing documentary that are welcome relief from the hammering proletarian-minded conscientiousness of the jarring town scenes. Despite its oppressive air, Wildrose hints at an unconscious beauty that comes through in quiet moments when content, not complacency, is the offered solution.