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THE
CLAIM
7/10
UK/Canada
2000
dir
Michael Winterbottom
scr Frank Cottrell Boyce (inspired by novel The Mayor of Casterbridge
by Thomas Hardy)
cin Alwin Kuchler
stars Wes Bentley, Peter Mullan, Sarah Polley, Milla Jovovich
120 minutes
Wintry
Klondike western The Claim has all the makings of a colossal downer.
Winterbottom’s last Hardy adaptation was Jude (from Jude the
Obscure), and Casterbridge’s grim template threatens similarly
dour results. The trailer hints that, like the snow, tragedy will swirl
and engulf all, driven by Michael Nyman’s relentless score. These advance
impressions perhaps explainthe film’s meagre box-office returns - then
there’s that title to contend with, or rather non-title, all too
easily confused with that of another current release, The Gift.
Why on earth did they discard the original choice, Kingdom Come
– a more resonant phrase, and a more accurate description the movie’s
content?
For
this is, at heart, the biography of a settlement – Kingdom Come, in the
snowy reaches of 19th century Northern California – from birth
to sudden demise, as much as the story of its inhabitants and visitors.
Dillon (Mullan) is the boss of Kingdom Come, having built it up from a
single shack 30 years before. He purchased the ‘claim’ on the land (and
any gold found there) from its original settler, in exchange for his wife
Elena and infant daughter Hope. Decades later they return, Elena (Kinski)
ailing and penniless, Hope (Polley) unaware of the past events.
Dillon’s
problems are complicated by railroad engineer Dalgleish (Bentley), who
arrives to survey the land with a view to laying tracks near Kingdom Come,
thus ensuring its growth from hamlet into small town. Dalglish strikes
up a relationship with Hope; Dillon, tormented by guilt, breaks with prostitute
Lucia (Jovovich), and marries Elena “again”; Dalglish must decide Kingdom
Come’s future – and thus Dillon’s, Hope’s, and his own…
At
this point The Claim could easily have headed down dark avenues
of morbid melodrama – but, refreshingly, things don’t pan out as expected.
Lucia reveals herself to be a fiery, independent spirit, but without the
malice a lesser film might have allocated such a ‘woman spurned.’ She
and Dalglish start an affair – meaning that, while Dalglish’s relationship
with Hope is the emotional core of the movie, it isn’t any kind of spectacular
grand passion, more a believable function of their circumstances. Such
developments have seen The Claim criticised as undercooked and
aimless – but the film’s strength lies in its refusal to follow the well-trodden
path of previous tragic westerns. Boyce’s script avoids easy ironies –
towards the end of the film, when another new settlement is founded, it
must have been tempting to give it the name of one of today’s big cities
– but the temptation was resisted.
It’s
also helpful that the five principal roles are all intriguingly rounded,
and strikingly well-cast and acted, although Kinski’s performance rapidly
narrows into scenes where she’s lying in bed, coughing and dying. Bentley
confirms the startling promise of American Beauty was no fluke
– with his huge eyes, pale skin and thick black hair and beard, he becomes
an element in cinematographer Kuchler’s near-monochrome recreations of
contemporary landscape photographs. As written, Dalglish requires a steely,
confident type of youthfulness, and it’s there in Bentley’s every action
and look, there in the icy tones of his voice. His crisp diction allows
him to get away with mouthing the movie’s homiletic last line, making
a windy moral sound fresh and wise.
The
script isn’t entirely free of such clunkers – there’s a heavy-handedness
about the way we catch the lines “I am Ozymandias, King of Kings: look
upon my works, ye mighty, and despair” during a bar-room recital. Another
recital later on highlights a different problem – Hope and her mother,
we’re told, are from Boston. But when Polley, in a pivotal scene, recites
an Irish poem, there’s no effort to give her any trace of the distinctive
Massachusetts accent. Why bother mentioning Boston at all? Much fuss is
made of Lucia being from Portugal – but you’d never guess it from the
way she speaks.
Winterbottom
is a prolific film-maker – he seems to churn one out ever year, most recently
Wonderland – and this perhaps explains his occasional sloppiness.
There’s no reason, for example, to switch to hand-held for a few seconds
when the camera follows some people up a flight of stairs. If he’s strong
with actors, giving them room to develop rounded characters, he’s undeniably
weak in other areas - he’s never been much of a visual stylist, and too
often he either quotes too blatantly from McCabe and Mrs Miller
and Days of Heaven, or else falls into the traps of cliché that
the script so nimbly avoids – Jovovich smoking in front of a mirror; shadowy
slow-motion in the flashbacks to Dillon selling his family…
But
it’s easy to overlook Winterbottom’s rather uninspired “eye” when he’s
got such powerful tools as Bentley, the Rockies, and Nyman’s score to
play with. Though Individual details and moments may snag, the broad sweep
is persuasive – The Claim convincingly, intelligently dramatises
how individuals shape and are shaped by their circumstances, how towns
and nations are formed and destroyed - and how all these forces combine
to produce our history, and our present.
March
2nd, 2001
by Neil
Young
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