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Like Oliver Stone and the 1960s, or Barry Levinson and the City of Baltimore, Michael Winterbottom may be forever associated with Victorian author Thomas Hardy. The Claim is the second film Winterbottom has directed from a script based on one of Hardy's novels (the other was the stellar Jude, from `Jude the Obscure'). Here, the director borrows the story from Hardy's `The Mayor of Casterbridge' but updates the setting from 19th century Dorset, England to the waning days of the California Gold Rush.
One of Winterbottom's gifts is his collaboration ability with actors of various backgrounds, from the professionally trained Kate Winslet to … errr … well, to Woody Harrelson. And The Claim's marquee reads like a who's who of people snubbed by Oscar over the last three years – Sarah Polley (for 1997's The Sweet Hereafter), Peter Mullan (‘98's My Name is Joe) and Wes Bentley (‘99's American Beauty). Despite the acting talent on board, and Winterbottom's familiarity with adapting Hardy's work, The Claim doesn't work as well as it should. It's still a decent film, and it grows more and more interesting as it progresses, but the picture is as flat as Calista Flockhart.
The film is set during 1867 in California's Sierra Nevada Mountains (it was filmed in Alberta, British Columbia) and, as the film opens, the tiny town of Kingdom Come has just welcomed two groups of people to its settlement. The first is led by Donald Daglish (Bentley), the chief engineer of Central Pacific Railroad's expedition. Daglish and his men are one step ahead of CP's railroad and are looking for cities that are topographically and geographically ideal for the construction of said railroad.
The second group contains only two people – a young woman named Hope (Polley) and her dying mother, Elena (Nastassja Kinski, who, ironically, starred in the film version of Hardy's `Tess of the D'Urbervilles'). A flashback from some two decades earlier tells us that a young Elena and infant Hope were sold to a complete stranger for a small bag of gold by none other than Hope's own father, Daniel Dillon.
Years after that callous transaction, Dillon (Mullan) parlayed the gold into Kingdom Come. He owns everything in the town and has settled down with Lucia, the Portuguese manager of the local whorehouse (Milla Jovovich, The Messenger). Dillon has enough gold to open a private wing in Fort Knox but needs a train station placed in his town for it to have a chance to become a real city. Of course, his plans for Kingdom Come get put on the back burner when his former wife and grown daughter stumble back into his life.
There's enough romantic potential in the film (Hope and Daglish, Daglish and Lucia, Lucia and Dillon, Dillon and Elena, and a bizarre side story focusing on a one of Daglish's workmen and a common hooker), but none of it amounts to much. The Claim certainly looks great – from the realistic sets and props, to Alwin H. Kuchler's sound photography of the snow, wind, trees and mountains – although it's not as quite as chilly and bleak as A Time for Drunken Horses, or as pretty as Snow Falling on Cedars.
Of the actors, Mullan and Polley are the only standouts. Bentley, who looks surprisingly like Tobey Maguire in Ride With the Devil, doesn't seem as comfortable with his character as he did in Beauty, but he's still the thinking man's Jared Leto. Kinski has little to do but cough up blood.
Winterbottom's direction is pretty ordinary and, for some reason, he chooses to begin and end several of the scenes with out-of-focus shots. Instead of having any kind of cinematic effect on the film, it succeeds only in making viewers think the projectionist has fallen asleep. It's good to see Winterbottom return to adapting films from novels, as opposed to the disappointing Wonderland, which was based on an original screenplay. Here, his Welcome to Sarajevo scribe Frank Cottrell Boyce does the dirty work of taking Hardy's work and transposing it into America's Wild West.
Interestingly, The Claim was originally called Kingdom Come but had to change its name because of – hold on to your hats – a Whoopi Goldberg film bearing the same name. An online contest was created to choose a new name, hence we have The Claim – which really applies to Dillon's original claim to the gold, and then, later, his claim to his family. A nice touch, but a dumb name nonetheless. The film's official website is probably the best since The Blair Witch Project in terms of interesting content.
2:03 – R for nudity, adult language, violence and sexual content
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