Now Showing: The Claim

Now Showing
Candid Reviews of Movies Just Hitting The Big Screen

The Claim

by Cole Smithey

As a gorgeously stark vision of the harsh snow encrusted terrain of Sierra Nevada in the years following the Gold Rush of 1849, The Claim is a stunning and elegant depiction. However, as a dramatic allegory, the movie falls short of imbuing its pioneer-spirited characters with an authentic sense of time, place and ultimately a sufficiently life-affirming value. It’s a movie that divides itself between an overwrought yet unfulfilling story and beautifully filmed locations observed in indelible images of an American environmental crossroads. Ostensibly The Claim is about a greedy gold miner who sells his wife and child in return for a claim to a gold rich mine, only to realize years later the impotent value of his riches when his former wife and child return asking for his assistance.

Director Michael Winterbottom (Welcome To Sarajevo, Wonderland) draws on Thomas Hardy’s 1886 fable “The Mayor of Casterbridge” as the narrative skeleton that screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce hangs his script. Daniel Dillon (Peter Mulan - Miss Julie) is the virtual owner of a flourishing mountain town called Kingdom Come. Dillon keeps enough bricks of gold inside the vault of his bank to make the guys at Fort Knox envious, and has an exoticly beautiful wife named Lucia (Milla Jovovich - The Fifth Element) if the gold wasn’t enough to inspire resentment. He’s a man who has risen to be the biggest fish in a very small pond. Things change very quickly for Dillon when a surveyor from the Central Pacific Railroad, named Mr. Dalglish (Wes Bentley - American Beauty), and two women arrive in town. Elena (Nastassja Kinski - Cat People) and Hope (Sarah Polley - The Sweet Hereafter) are a mother and daughter seeking financial assistance from Dillon to help with Elena’s badly failing health. While Mr. Dalglish holds the cards for the future of Kingdom Come in his hands.

For as convincing and competent as Peter Mulan and Nastassja Kinski are in their time ravaged roles, Wes Bentley and Sarah Polley are lazy and problematically ‘Generation X’ in their body language and delivery of dialogue. Bentley and Polley are two modern actors incapable of pulling off the demands of period acting. Bentley especially seems unfit for his part as he cracks ironic smirks and drool glances at other actors with whom he shares scenes. He comes across as an unrefined actor too conceited to get down to the work of acting. It’s not that he ‘breaks’ character, but that he seems to have never developed one in the first place.

Mr. Dalglish is a man who has the power to make or break Kingdom Come by introducing or bypassing the Central Pacific Railroad. While the Dalglish subplot is integral to the story, Winterbottom allows the narrative offshoot to detract from the purity of the main storyline. One unnecessary bit of pyrotechnics involving an accident with nitroglycerine finds Dalglish’s men exploding a horse and carriage in the middle of a shallow river. The scene directly weakens the effect of the denouement of the movie and occasions an action suspense element that makes you feels like you’re watching an historical rendition of Vertical Limit instead of a serious drama.

Ironically the scenes that crystallize the social reality of the untamed west involve prostitutes servicing their clients under the strict supervision of the house madam. The movie gets a charge of not-so-innocent rustic energy from a romance between a whore and one of her johns that turns to marriage. Julian Richings (Urban Legend) is Bellinger, a greasy but likable rambling man who falls for the prostitute with a heart of gold.

The Claim is a movie that pins its emotional import on an event that occurred long before the movie began. The briefly reunited relationship between Dillon and Elena doesn’t explain how she spent her years before tracking down the man who betrayed her and their baby. The missing information is all the more relevant for the intriguing identity that Kinski creates in the few scenes in which she appears. The daughter of the late Klaus Kinski gives a show-stopping performance that would surly have made her father proud.