Mustang92 Let's face it. Michael Winterbottom is an overrated director. Plain and simple. Name one movie of his that you think is brilliant. Can you? Surely not. And this movie is the exact opposite of brilliant.Most of the negative comments here are entirely accurate. The movie is boring as hell -- and from the get-go -- and this director seems to be totally in love with the cinematography. Shots go on way too long, way beyond any point, and there are many shots in this film that have no point whatsoever. (Well... that's true for most of this movie, there is no point whatsoever.)The premise of this film is not bad, but the execution was horrendous. Bad directing, mediocre acting -- and I blame the director for this, and a script that should never have been made. And least not by this director. I've never seen one movie of his that I could say "Wow" about, not one. And while it's perhaps not fair to compare this film to, say, "Once Upon a Time in the West," given the only thing they really have in common is the subplot of a train line that is coming... not one second of that film is boring, all 2 hours & 40 minutes. Yet at least 3/4ths of "The Claim" is utterly boring. Uninteresting. Dead. How is that possible for an under 2-hour movie? Put Mr. Winterbottom at the helm, that's how.

chaos-rampant In 1840's Missouri, the launching pad for manifest destiny, they used to say about people preparing to go West when it was most of it unsettled wilderness, that they were "jumping off". The film is about several such people who have made the jump from faraway homes, some are Irish come West with the famine, others Polish-born or from Lisbon."Jumping off", the phrase connotes the vastness of no man's land, a kind of cosmic gap.Ford's western wrote the legend, but left out those gaps of muddled life, which had to wait until around the time of Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller. The filmmaker shoots in this mode, so muddled life, drifting gaze, lingering shots of ordinary nothing. Vast mountain nature.But he also wants this to be an elegy to the passing of the West in that reflective vein of recent westerns, and some questionable acting, soporific drama and overly-emotive Nyman score, negate the unobtrusive lightness of just life. So this was probably ruined on a technical level, but there is something to recommend it.One of those who jumped off is a man, who in a log cabin one night with snow-blizzards raging outside, bartered everything he would need to be whole as an old man for what he would eventually have too much of to have any use for. He has built a town with his gold, but that night of years ago which has left a gap in him comes back one day.The notion is that you wake up one day and life has gone, and so long as it settles on this in a visual way, the film has spark. There is a great shot worthy of Herzog, where he has a two-story frame house hauled by horses across the snow, a home for his loved one— this is how deeply he regrets that night.This will be later mirrored in the whole town relocating to where the new railroad is going to pass through—which leaves him stubbornly alone in his empty town. This is followed by a great finale of madness and ruin.But there is too much doodling in the snow with second-rate romance and elegy, it never takes off from the edge. It's ultimately a letdown, which is a shame, because when you go through it all, there is a great film somewhere in there.

James Hitchcock Thomas Hardy's "The Mayor of Casterbridge" must rank as one of the greatest English novels never to have been made into an English-language feature film, although there was a good television serialisation during the 1970s and a silent version made in 1921, during Hardy's lifetime. (He even acted as an adviser to the film-makers). Michael Winterbottom's "The Claim" is very loosely based upon Hardy's novel, although the action is shifted from the Dorset of the 1820s and 1840s to the California of the 1840s and 1860s. (This was Winterbottom's second film with a Hardy connection; he had made "Jude" four years earlier). The Michael Henchard character is Daniel Dillon, an Irish immigrant to California during the Gold Rush of 1849, and the equivalents of Susan Henchard and Elizabeth-Jane Newson are his wife Elena and his daughter Hope. Like Henchard, Dillon sells his wife and daughter to another man, in this case a prospector named Burn in exchange for his the gold claim. The claim proves to be a profitable one, and Dillon makes a fortune. Eighteen years later he is the Mayor of the small town of Kingdom Come and the richest man in the district. When Elena and Hope reappear in the town. Burn has died, leaving them penniless, and Dillon, whose conscience still troubles him, "marries" Elena for a second time, abandoning his Portuguese mistress Lucia in order to do so. (As her name suggests, Lucia is roughly the equivalent of Hardy's Lucetta). There are a number of differences between the film and the book which inspired it. The Farfrae character, Donald Dalglish, is not a business rival of Dillon but a surveyor with the Central Pacific Railroad whose job is to decide whether or not the railway line should be routed through Kingdom Come. (If he decides in favour of the town, this will greatly increase Dillon's prosperity). In the novel Newson, the sailor to whom Henchard sells his wife, is wrongly believed to be dead after being lost at sea, but later turns up alive, whereas Burn really is dead. Elizabeth-Jane turns out to be Susan's daughter by Newson, Henchard's daughter of the same name having died in infancy, whereas Dillon really is Hope's biological father. Besides Hardy's novel, the greatest influence upon this film was Robert Altman's "McCabe and Mrs Miller". Like Altman's hero John McCabe, Dillon is an entrepreneur whose business initially prospers but who is eventually ruined by forces beyond his control. Whereas Lucetta was a respectable lady of good family (although compromised by her extra- marital liaison with Henchard), Lucia, like Constance Miller in Altman's film, is a brothel-keeper. Both films end with a scene of a building burning in a snowy landscape, and both have a haunting musical score (provided in "McCabe and Mrs Miller by Leonard Cohen and here composed by Michael Nyman). Nyman's score is one of this film's two main virtues. The other is the striking photography of the snow-covered mountains; all the action takes place in winter. (Although the film is ostensibly set in California, it was actually filmed in Alberta, Canada). Apart from these two points, however, "The Claim" has little else going for it. The action is ponderous, slow-moving and often confusing, a particular case in point being the flashback scene where Dillon sells Elena and Hope to Burn. There is nothing to indicate that this is a flashback, especially as the actors playing the young Dillon and Elena bear no resemblance to those playing their older selves. Peter Mullan never brings Dillon to life, although this is perhaps not surprising given that Dillon is not so much a character in his own right as an amalgam of two other fictional characters, Michael Henchard and John McCabe, from two other works in different media. Nastassja Kinski disappears from the film all too soon (her character, Elena, dies quite early on) and although Sarah Polley as Hope is reasonably good, Milla Jovovich as Lucia never does anything to dispel the view I had formed of her from other films, namely that she is one of those actresses (Bo Derek being another example) whose Hollywood career owes less to her talents than to her looks and influential connections. For all its chilly visual beauty, "The Claim" is a film with little to recommend it. I am surprised that, following "Jude", Winterbottom did not opt to make a "straight" version of "The Mayor of Casterbridge". 4/10

liscarkat Some of the things that make this a bad movie: I. The movie is confusing, either intentionally (pretentiously) or due to ineptitude.A. A flashback near the beginning of the movie gives no indication that it is a flashback. There's just a shot in which we see people we haven't seen before, without any verbal or stylistic suggestion that this is a scene from the past. The younger actors portraying Dillon and his wife in the flashback bear no resemblance to the actors playing the same roles in the present.B. Although approximately twenty years have elapsed since Dillon sold his wife, he appears to have aged at least thirty years, while she has apparently aged less than ten years. The two actors portraying the woman look so close in age that either of them could have played the part in both the present and the flashbacks. That would have alleviated a small amount of confusion.C. The two unfamiliar actors portraying Dillon and his right-hand man are approximately the same age, have the same build, are the same height, have the same style of gray beard, and wear the same style and color of clothing and hat.II. Much of the plot and the characters' actions seem unmotivated.A. Why does Dillon sell the woman and baby? Near the beginning of the movie, when we see him do this in a flashback, it makes a little more sense. We are led to believe that he has no more attachment to them than to hitch hikers he picked up along his way. His only description of their relationship is that he has "been dragging them across the country," and the woman barely protests. There is little or no emotion or hesitation. It's somewhat believable that he might trade them for gold. But what gives him the right to sell them? Does he own them? Much later in the movie we find out that he and the woman were married and the baby was his. Near the end of the movie, there is a vague implication that he was drunk when he sold them (although there was no hint of it in the flashback). Drunk or not, he must have been pretty angry at both of them for some reason we are never let in on.B. Why does Dillon move his house? It seems to be no more than a gratuitous action scene to give this soporific movie a moment of liveliness (like the pointless explosion of the survey party's supply wagon).C. Why do Dillon and many of the town's men go ballistic when the railroad engineer decides that the tracks can't go through their town? Did the railroad have a contract with them? Did the railroad owe them anything? Dillon and his men were not justified in showing up with rifles and threatening the railroad surveyors.D. Why does Dillon murder two railroad men, and why are there no consequences to him for this brutal, pointless act? There are at least two references to a sheriff in the town, yet he never makes an appearance. No one seems to be upset at all as a result of the murders.III. The actors use accents inconsistently. Both Dillon and Lucy sometimes have accents, and sometimes don't. Dillon, in particular, is ridiculous because at times he has almost no accent and then in the next scene he has a thick brogue that's barely understandable.IV. Anachronistic speech. "You're full of ****!" in 1867? V. Anachronistic hair styles.A. All of the women in the movie, be they prostitutes or not, have stringy, badly groomed hair hanging in their eyes. Try to find a photograph from the 1860s of any woman, anywhere, of any occupation or social class (including prostitutes) with hair like that. Either a studio portrait or a candid shot. You can't.B. Several men of the survey party have long, poorly groomed hair. This is not from the 1860s; it is left over from western movies of the early 1970s.VI. The railroad surveyors are portrayed as semi-literate ruffians. In reality, railroad survey engineers were college-educated, literate men (and real, 19th century college).VII. The railroad survey takes place in deep snow.A. How do they steady their tripods on the snow? B. They are measuring the snow surface, which, in the Sierra Nevada in winter, can be several yards deep. What use would that be? The ground surface would be incorrectly measured, and many prominent topographic features would be overlooked.VIII. The story is set in a mining town, with a large stamp mill next to the hotel and residences where most of the action takes place, yet the mill is obviously never running and the miners seem to spend all of their time carousing and whoring. If this mill had been in use we would have heard it roaring and seen it pouring smoke night and day throughout the movie. Apparently no mining is going on at all. Only the prostitutes are employed.IX. General implausibility.A. A large, wood-framed house is dragged (for no apparent reason) over several hundred yards of ungraded ground, down a hill slope. When it arrives at its destination, no leveling takes place; it's just perfect the way it lands. Dillon, the owner, walks inside and there are no cracks in the walls or broken windows. Even more amazing, the tables and shelves are covered with vases of flowers, decorative pottery, and sculptures that have not tipped over.B. Dillon sets fire to the town with a magic torch. All he has to do is tap any object, be it upholstery, wooden wall, or thick timber framing, and it instantly bursts into fully engulfing flames.In conclusion, the evidence appears to indicate the unfortunate fact that this movie is FULL OF ****!