Six years after his account of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, director Michael Winterbottom has returned to the 19th-century master of tragic gloom with an elegant and, in some ways, inspired transposition of The Mayor of Casterbridge to the wilds of 1860s California in The Claim. It is set at the height of the Gold Rush, where fortunes are to be made and lost and it’s every man for himself.
Twenty years previously Daniel Dillon, played with haggard severity by Peter Mullan, had sold his wife and baby daughter in return for a small claim. He has now built that up into his own personal boom-town suzerainty, but his latent feelings of grief, guilt and horror are reawakened at the arrival of his now grown-up daughter, Hope, played by Sarah Polley, and Nastassja Kinski, who — sic transit gloria mundi — plays the mother, with very little to do or say other than moan and cough up blood.
Winterbottom and his cinemato-grapher Alwin Kuchler (director of photography on Winterbottom’s Ratcatcher) demonstrate an intelligent and deeply felt response to the snow-blanketed landscape and its cold, clean light. They conjure startling images from this canvas. Added to this are performances of fierce integrity from Mullan and of gentleness and grace from Polley.
But the supporting roles are more uncertain: Wes Bentley is Dalglish, the railroad surveyor, one moment coolly refusing Dillon’s offer of gambling chips to show his incorruptibility, the next cheerfully accepting preferential, two-gals-at-once treatment at the brothel. He’s the nice guy who seems sweet on Hope, but he’s capable of shooting a man in cold blood. Is his character complex — or is the writing muddled? And there’s a bit of a leap of faith necessary to believe Milla Jovovich as the cheroot-smoking brothel owner from Portugal.
This is a film of bracing high seriousness and amplitude, with a literate sense of history and place. But there is something lugubrious and unvarying about Winterbottom’s pacing, which obscures the urgency of the story-telling itself. It’s a film with very big territorial ambitions — but it doesn’t quite stake its claim.