The Claim [DVD] [2001]

In this gentle-paced and beautifully shot epic, the director has taken Hardy's 'Mayor of Casterbridge' from England to gold-rush America. In doing so he has preserved the novel's themes: the clash of the old world with the new, the lust for glory and the tragedy of personal ambition. The acting is exceptional, the scenery stunning, and the soundtrack by Nyman sets the mood perfectly. This is not a film for the MTV generation: although it is a simple morality tale it is told in a thoughtful and compelling way that rewards attention to its subtleties. A film for the soul.

I would urge Amazon's WWW site's users to obtain and to view this film, but with a warning. The narrative of the film does not reveal itself very clearly. I even had read the novel ("The Mayor of Casterbridge") by Thomas Hardy on which the film was based (with a transfer from a British to an American Western setting, with changes in the names of the characters), but had read that great work too long ago to be able to recall enough of it to follow clearly what the film, too, was portraying. I did manage to "get the gist of it" despite a lot of confusion along the way, but it was a summary of the action of the motion picture, on a WWW site that made it all congeal together, "after the fact" of having viewed it, rather than adequate clues of a visual sort or from the dialogue from the movie itself while I first was watching it.

The film is visually very beautiful. The mountainous California scenery is magnificent and rather well and atmospherically filmed. The young male actor, Wes Bentley, who plays the role of Dalglish, the railroad planner, provides the main human pulchritude, very handsome and youtfully appealing, real "eye candy". His acting is less than stunning, perhaps at least in part due to the apparent need to affect a foreign accent that he conveys with only intermittent ability to convince. One of the problems, though, that this film has with conveying the narrative is that so much attention on the character of Dalglish (Bentley), especially so near to the beginning of the movie, distracts the viewer's attention from the plight (until revived later as the action progresses) of Daniel Dillon (played by Peter Mullan), who, after all, is the central character around whose fate this cinematic work turns. What occurs in flashbacks to the past and what is happening in the action's present also is unclear, creating potential confusion for the viewer.

The film might have benefitted from a better and more assertive score. Too much happens without the evocative enhancement that a more skillful and prominent score would have provided.

A good motion picture this is, in short, but do some "homework" to prepare yourself to follow the story that this film recounts with such visual beauty. I would like to see my DVD of this movie a few more times, to feast the eyes on the lofty loveliness of the mountain setting and on the boyishly bearded beauty of Wes Bentley, so, I guess that this is adequate to have provoked that opening, decided recommendation to you from me!

It may be harsh to say that Michael Winterbottom is one of the most consistently bad directors working today, but his emphasis on often counterproductive technique at the expense of story or character has resulted in an almost unbroken run of poor films from promising material - which in many ways is far worse than making bad films out of videogames. Ever the alchemist, once again he manages to turn gold into base metal with The Claim, a fairly lavish version of Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge relocated to the California mountains during the Gold Rush. While the basic story transposes rather well - a down on his luck prospector who sold his wife and child for a gold claim and rose to rule the town that grew up around it finds himself on the road to destruction when they reappear and he attempts to make amends - it's little more than an underdeveloped skeletal outline that never grips, feeling less an attempt at subtlety, more underwritten.

While it throws out the complexity of the source material, there's enough left here that could have made a good adult Western drama in other hands, especially in the neat turn around from genre tradition that sees Peter Mullan's all-powerful Mayor of Kingdom Come trying to persuade Wes Bentley's surveyor to drive the railroad through his town to ensure its growth. Yet it never gets to the heart of the story, playing the big scenes for less than they're worth (hard to believe any director could botch a scene of Mullan harnessing the whole town to manhaul his marital home across the snow and into the heart of town, but Winterbottom manages it) and constantly pushing characters and story into the background without ever placing anything in the foreground to compensate. Worse, no present-day action in the film has any real consequence, which is fairly disastrous for a morality play about consequences. It's the kind of film where people get killed and their death makes no impression on the emotions or actions of anyone around them leaving a dreary, inconsequential film with no drive.

Rather than story or character, Winterbottom seems interested in recreating the world of McCabe and Mrs Miller, but he's taken all the worst of Altman without any of the best. There may be an occasional improvised feel, but it's rarely harnessed to the film's benefit, feeling like undisciplined self-indulgence and all too symptomatic of the way that far too much of the film is played out of focus, both metaphorically and literally. Indeed, it often feels like a film whose few strengths have little to do with the director. Peter Mullan is superb as the Mayor, convincingly essaying the kind of man who can rule an entire town by sheer force of will alone, but while you understand his emptiness, the film never allows you to feel for it, leaving the finale a rather empty spectacle rather than genuine tragedy. If anything, the film's tragedy is that Mullan didn't get a film worthy of his performance. Unfortunately the supporting performances are rather dull and characterless: Nastassja Kinski has little to do but waste away, Sarah Polley isn't able to do much with her cardboard good girl, Milla Jovovich lacks the moxie her saloon manger cries out for while Wes Bentley tries to coast on charisma without ever having enough to do the trick. Instead they're outshone by production designer Mark Tildesley's superbly recreated snowy mountain town and a surprisingly powerful and heartfelt Michael Nyman score that abandons his usual mathematical masturbation for something more grandiose and passionate. And you know what they say about shows where you come out humming the scenery...

Pathe's DVD has a good 2.35:1 widescreen transfer but the only extra is the film's trailer.