The town of Kingdom Come sits atop a hill looking out across desolate planes of snow, its buildings both grand yet near to collapse. No weapons are allowed to be brought into Kingdom Come; the townsfolk simply go about their business with little toil or trouble, content with their simple way of life, always safe beneath the watchful gaze of their no-nonsense 'mayor' Mr Dillon. That is until Dalglish - a charismatic railroad surveyor - and his party of workers bustle into town.
This is a film about secrets... a story of one man's personal redemption told on the largest scale. The key elements, betrayal, power, ambition, identity, loss... are all separate elements of one rich-tapestry, creating a sort-of Greek tragedy amidst the decline of the Wild West frontier. This description may conjure images of Peckinpah and The Wild Bunch. However director Michael Winterbottom is as far removed from Bloody Sam as any filmmaker can get. Here, the director's cinematic approach is one of quiet restraint. The film begins unassumingly with no music and no credits, just rapid, hand-held shots of Dalglish and his posse riding into town. Voices over-lap, horses stamp their hooves into the snow, characters drift in and out of frame, as Winterbottom forces the audience to identify with these outsiders, forcing us to feel their confusion of entering this alien-world.
Hostility and camaraderie are both set-up in these opening scenes, as is the quasi-love-triangle between the central trio, Dalglish, Dillon, and Dillon's mistress Lucile, who owns the town's whorehouse and sings flamenco in the local bar. Added to this troika are two mysterious women. Hope, a young lady who believes Dillon to be a relative of her long-lost father, and Elena, Hope's TB stricken mother. Writer Frank Cottrell Boyce integrates these characters slowly, letting relationships within relationships build as if part of an extended chamber piece. The film's central enigma is treated in a similar fashion, with flashbacks growing from scenes of personal longing, almost seamless in the way they drift into the film - never hurried or forced - they transmit information through confusion, forcing the viewer out of the film temporarily and then easing us back in.
The use of the town as a central metaphor - or as testament to Dillon's prevailing greed and anguish - makes Winterbottom more akin to filmmakers like Fassbinder and Herzog, as apposed to Altman or Cimmino, whose McCabe and Mrs Miller and Heaven's Gate are so often sighted as reference points here. With the town, and to an extent its brothel, used as a symbol of capitalism - of exchange and demand - we see many similarities emerge with Fassbinder's Lola or Querelle. The naturalistic filming technique and over-lapping dialog, or the heightened sense of confusion employed in the opening scenes can also be seen as a continuation of the German director's 'In a Year of 13 Moons'. Even one of The Claim's most ambitious and impressive sequences - the moving of Dillon's house - owes an obvious debt to Herzog's Fitzcaraldo - another heavily symbolic film about obsession.
Winterbottom takes Alwin H. Kuchler's widescreen photography, which should suggest epic beauty, and couples it with scenes of gritty despair. Here the technique mirrors that of Fellini's in Satyricon or Casanova, in which the façade of a seemingly sophisticated society is brought into decline by outside elements; but shot through with an antiseptic sheen of designer misery. The handheld cameras, jarring jump cuts and continual shifts in focus belie the film's literary roots, as does the relocation of setting, so radical in it's approach that one could fail to notice that this is an adaptation of Hardy's very English novel 'The Mayor of Casterbridge'. Here Boyce and Winterbottom have made the change in an attempt to internalise the character's tragedy, to suggest a coldness to their relationships, creating the grand vision of a town swamped by surrounding desolation.
The Claim is about restraint, emotional, personal... even cinematic. It is only towards the film's climax - as the events spiral out of control - that any sign of emotion is aloud to build within the characters. As Michael Nyman's score grows, the enigma of The Claim becomes clear; with the image of Dillon, his face blank of expression, his eyes burning with intensity, striding through his empty town as fire consumes it. An echo of the scene in which the trail wagon explodes, leaving a horse to retreat into the hills, engulfed by flames. This is a powerful, sombre film. mixing notions of western mythology with the codes of social realist drama. The slow pace and non-reliance on narrative tension may seem off-putting for some, just as the sparseness of information delivered in the opening scenes may prove somewhat elliptical or distracting.
This however, is unimportant... since this a film that favours emotion over narrative, offering us a bleak depiction of one town's redemption. Winterbottom - who also directed a version of Hardy's Jude the Obscure - knows perfectly well the limitations of text to screen translations. Thus, The Claim acts in opposition to this, shattering the novel's external window-dressing and instead, creating a work built around internal and individual desires; similar in vain to the director's own masterpiece, Wonderland.
This is a film about secrets... a story of one man's personal redemption told on the largest scale. The key elements, betrayal, power, ambition, identity, loss... are all separate elements of one rich-tapestry, creating a sort-of Greek tragedy amidst the decline of the Wild West frontier. This description may conjure images of Peckinpah and The Wild Bunch. However director Michael Winterbottom is as far removed from Bloody Sam as any filmmaker can get. Here, the director's cinematic approach is one of quiet restraint. The film begins unassumingly with no music and no credits, just rapid, hand-held shots of Dalglish and his posse riding into town. Voices over-lap, horses stamp their hooves into the snow, characters drift in and out of frame, as Winterbottom forces the audience to identify with these outsiders, forcing us to feel their confusion of entering this alien-world.
Hostility and camaraderie are both set-up in these opening scenes, as is the quasi-love-triangle between the central trio, Dalglish, Dillon, and Dillon's mistress Lucile, who owns the town's whorehouse and sings flamenco in the local bar. Added to this troika are two mysterious women. Hope, a young lady who believes Dillon to be a relative of her long-lost father, and Elena, Hope's TB stricken mother. Writer Frank Cottrell Boyce integrates these characters slowly, letting relationships within relationships build as if part of an extended chamber piece. The film's central enigma is treated in a similar fashion, with flashbacks growing from scenes of personal longing, almost seamless in the way they drift into the film - never hurried or forced - they transmit information through confusion, forcing the viewer out of the film temporarily and then easing us back in.
The use of the town as a central metaphor - or as testament to Dillon's prevailing greed and anguish - makes Winterbottom more akin to filmmakers like Fassbinder and Herzog, as apposed to Altman or Cimmino, whose McCabe and Mrs Miller and Heaven's Gate are so often sighted as reference points here. With the town, and to an extent its brothel, used as a symbol of capitalism - of exchange and demand - we see many similarities emerge with Fassbinder's Lola or Querelle. The naturalistic filming technique and over-lapping dialog, or the heightened sense of confusion employed in the opening scenes can also be seen as a continuation of the German director's 'In a Year of 13 Moons'. Even one of The Claim's most ambitious and impressive sequences - the moving of Dillon's house - owes an obvious debt to Herzog's Fitzcaraldo - another heavily symbolic film about obsession.
Winterbottom takes Alwin H. Kuchler's widescreen photography, which should suggest epic beauty, and couples it with scenes of gritty despair. Here the technique mirrors that of Fellini's in Satyricon or Casanova, in which the façade of a seemingly sophisticated society is brought into decline by outside elements; but shot through with an antiseptic sheen of designer misery. The handheld cameras, jarring jump cuts and continual shifts in focus belie the film's literary roots, as does the relocation of setting, so radical in it's approach that one could fail to notice that this is an adaptation of Hardy's very English novel 'The Mayor of Casterbridge'. Here Boyce and Winterbottom have made the change in an attempt to internalise the character's tragedy, to suggest a coldness to their relationships, creating the grand vision of a town swamped by surrounding desolation.
The Claim is about restraint, emotional, personal... even cinematic. It is only towards the film's climax - as the events spiral out of control - that any sign of emotion is aloud to build within the characters. As Michael Nyman's score grows, the enigma of The Claim becomes clear; with the image of Dillon, his face blank of expression, his eyes burning with intensity, striding through his empty town as fire consumes it. An echo of the scene in which the trail wagon explodes, leaving a horse to retreat into the hills, engulfed by flames. This is a powerful, sombre film. mixing notions of western mythology with the codes of social realist drama. The slow pace and non-reliance on narrative tension may seem off-putting for some, just as the sparseness of information delivered in the opening scenes may prove somewhat elliptical or distracting.
This however, is unimportant... since this a film that favours emotion over narrative, offering us a bleak depiction of one town's redemption. Winterbottom - who also directed a version of Hardy's Jude the Obscure - knows perfectly well the limitations of text to screen translations. Thus, The Claim acts in opposition to this, shattering the novel's external window-dressing and instead, creating a work built around internal and individual desires; similar in vain to the director's own masterpiece, Wonderland.