Thomas Hardy, who wrote poetry and fiction, wrote detailed stories full of richly drawn characters struggling against society and fate. While they would seem to be the type of novels that could be made into successful movies, that hasn’t always been the case. Director Michael Winterbottom, for example, has made three movie adaptations of Hardy novels. The first one, Jude, a straightforward movie version of Jude the Obscure, had two great performances by Kate Winslet and Rachel Griffiths, but failed to capture how the city it took place in was as much a character in the story as the main character (played by Christopher Eccleston). The most recent one, Trishna, a loose, modern-day version of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, which also moved the setting to India, had the opposite problem; it captured the setting perfectly, but suffered from a flat performance by Frieda Pinto in the title role. Only The Claim, Winterbottom’s movie of Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge (adapted by Frank Cottrell Boyce), one of my favorite novels ever, comes off well.
Winterbottom and Boyce change the character names, and transplant the story from Victorian England to 1867 California during the Gold Rush (though it was shot in Alberta in Canada), but the story is essentially the same. Daniel Dillon (Peter Mullan) runs a town called Kingdom Come (the original title of the movie), and has his hand in almost everything that goes on in the town – including the bank, the hotel, and the law – except for a saloon/brothel, though since that’s run by Lucia (Milla Jovovich), his girlfriend, that suits him fine. Plus, he owns a fortune in gold. However, three visitors come to town who prove fateful to him. The first is Donald Daglish (Wes Bentley), a surveyor for the Central Pacific Railroad, and Dillon wants to please Daglish so that the railroad will go through Kingdom Come and bring prosperity to it, rather than to another town. The other two visitors are more worrying to Dillon – Elena (Nastassja Kinski) and her daughter Hope (Sarah Polley). 18 years earlier, Dillon had been married to Elena, and they were poor, but on one drunken night, Dillon sold them in exchange for a gold claim that allowed him to get rich. Now that the two have come back, a guilt-ridden Dillon wants to do right by them – especially since Elena is dying of tuberculosis – but he also wants to make sure none of this gets revealed to anyone else in town. Unfortunately, things don’t work out the way Dillon wants them to.
In addition to Hardy, Winterbottom and Boyce are also evoking Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller, in the way this is a western that isn’t about wide-open spaces and individuals determining their own destinies, but about cities, businessmen, and individuals whose destinies are determined by fate. They also have snow and cold in common. In spite of the bleakness of the setting, Winterbottom makes the town feel alive, rather than just a location. I have no idea if this is true, but the extras seem like they’re the same people throughout, rather than different people for each day, and it makes the town seem lived in. In addition to the major characters, there are also interesting supporting characters, such as Bellanger (Julian Richings), one of Daglish’s co-workers at the railroad, and Annie (Shirley Henderson, a Winterbottom regular), the prostitute who falls in love with him. All of this helps to augment the inevitable fate that awaits Dillon. Cinematographer Alwin Kuchler (in the first of two movies he’d shoot with Winterbottom) does a good job of evoking the look of the town as well.
Mullan has a tough job here, as we have to empathize with him despite the awful thing he did, but he never plays for false sympathy, and yet you can see goodness in him, as with the way he treats Lucia when they’re together, and also Elena. He’s also believable as someone in charge. Bentley looks a little too modern to be a 19th century railroad inspector, but he gets into the role, carries an air of authority to him, and also shows his essential good nature. And Polley, as usual, is natural and unaffected. The real surprise here is Jovovich. Best known for the Resident Evil movies, Jovovich has the bawdiness of a madam down pat (a real-life musician, she also sings well), but she also shows vulnerability in the way she reacts when Dillon leaves her for Elena, and in her scenes with Daglish. The Claim was pretty much ignored at the box office, despite the fact a few critics did champion it (as I recall, Richard Roeper put it on his 10 best list for the year), which is too bad, as it works both as a western and an adaptation of Hardy’s novel.
