Daniel Carlson
The land has looked this way for ten thousand years. Rocks and dirt that have never known roads; skies that have never been pricked by telephone poles. There aren’t even remnants of things that used to be. Nothing but the wilderness of pines and elk and icy lakes, of rivers dammed by beavers, of land shaped by fire, all of it under feet of snow carried from the top of the world. And now, across the skyline, comes a house being marched by a slow procession of people. They are carrying the enormous home as if they were mounting a funeral procession for a horrible god. It’s 1867.
There are many ways to read this scene in The Claim, or at least many levels on which it can be understood. There’s the auteurist nod to Fitzcarraldo, Herzog’s epic about a man determined to carry a steamship through the jungle on the backs of the tortured locals. (This actually has its own sublevel because the house is being moved by one character for another, the second of whom is played by Nastassja Kinski, the daughter of Klaus Kinski, who starred in Fitzcarraldo.) And there’s the visual metaphor of someone moving an entire furniture-filled home, a gesture both grandly romantic and grimly industrialist, the sign of the end of the blank-canvas way of life in the wilderness as men tame it and drive it through with steel rails and dynamited hills.
But maybe the most moving is its unknowing folly. This is the kind of hubris in the face of nature only man among all beasts seems to be able (or at least willing) to summon, an absolute recklessness in the face of all rational decision, a defiance in refusing to acknowledge nature’s ultimate power. We chopped down the woods and built it into a house and now we’re going to drag the house through the woods, ferrying the corpse through a cloud of its remaining family, thinking we can get away with it. But the furniture is the worse for wear because of the trip, and the recipient of the gift doesn’t really care about it, and a lot of all this will go up in smoke anyway.
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The Claim is a Western, which means it belongs to one of the three quintessential American art forms. (The others are baseball and jazz.) But it’s a Western with a different eye. The director, Michael Winterbottom, is English, and his body of work encompasses drama, science fiction, documentary, and comedy. If there’s a general through-line connecting the ideas he seems drawn to, it might be the toll that relationships exact on the people in them: e.g., this friction between inner and outer desires is played for noir in The Killer Inside Me and for cringing laughs in The Trip and its sequels. Being English, too, he knows from conquest, and he knows what it means to tell a story about the inherent self-destruction of imperialism; additionally, being English, he can tell a story about that destruction set in the American West without even accidentally romanticizing it. When the legend becomes fact, he seems to say, go back and get the fact before printing anything.
The source material is British, too: the novel The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy was first published in 1886, and though the story’s original setting was England (the fictional Casterbridge was Hardy’s stand-in for Dorchester), screenwriter Frank Cottrell-Boyce deftly keeps the core relationships intact while moving the action to the new world just a few earlier. I submit that the confluence of these nationalities is not a coincidence: Winterbottom is a big fan of Hardy’s works, having also adapted to date Jude the Obscure (as Jude, arguably his breakout film) and Tess of the d’Urbervilles (as Trishna), and he’s also partnered with Cottrell-Boyce six times, including on 24 Hour Party People, Code 46, and A Cock and Bull Story. The result of their partnership on The Claim is a film that feels so real, so dispassionately but not unkindly observed, that it stands out among Westerns for its perspective. Here is a movie about pioneers who don’t realize that they’re destroying the very wild that they claim to cherish so dearly, written and filmed by people who can speak with an honesty and remove about the consequences of subjugation.
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The heart of The Claim is a devil’s deal. During the gold rush of ’49, Daniel Dillon (Peter Mullan) and his wife, Elena (Kinski), lose almost everything in their desperate search for paydirt. Encountering a shack in a snowstorm, they meet a man who says he has a claim that will pay out. Daniel sells Elena and their infant child to the man in exchange for rights to the claim, taking the name of the man’s shack—Kingdom Come—as the name for the town he will found in its place. By the time of the main events, Daniel is rich and alone, lord of the small mining town of Kingdom Come and consumed by a molded-over grief that has never been remedied. Into this world come two arrivals that will change the course of everyone in the settlement: Donald Dalglish (Wes Bentley), a railroad company surveyor who is there to determine if the line to be constructed should run through Kingdom Come or someplace nearby; and Elena and the now-grown Hope (Sarah Polley), who have sought out Daniel in the wake of the death of the prospector who’d bought them, and who need to secure a future for Hope.
To sell one’s spouse and child for a scrap of paper entitling one to some gold; it’s a cruel, ugly, barbaric thing, and it’s the first thing that happens here. Foregrounding this transaction is Winterbottom’s way of making clear exactly what kind of world this was, and what was happening in the minds of the people who occupied it. Crucially, it also illustrates how actions like these are rarely the work of one person acting alone and are, instead, often the result of two hopeless souls shepherding each other into places most people never venture. For just as Daniel made his decision, he in turn becomes the seller in a series of teased transactions with Donald: if the surveyor agrees to recommend that the rail line come through Kingdom Come, Daniel promises to make him a wealthy man. I submit it is not an accident that Daniel Dillon and Donald Dalglish have the same set of initials. The first man sees not only a counterpart in the second, but a chance to absolve himself in a twisted way. If he can persuade Donald to compromise himself for money, Daniel can almost pass his guilt on, letting someone else take the weight of the knowledge that comes with discovering your soul’s price.
What makes the film feel magical in its way is Winterbottom’s refusal to let these emotionally charged plot lines run ahead of themselves. Everyone is on a collision course, but there’s almost a tranquility in that recognition. Put another way: this is not a movie where the ghost of the future looms over the happenings, providing viewers with the frisson of narrative irony because we know how Manifest Destiny and human weakness are acted out. There’s not a sense of anything that will happen afterward. Every decision seems firmly rooted in its moment, every character doing the best they can with what they know at the time. And a major component of this is the way it’s all dressed, shot, and lit. Bars and brothels function in guttering candlelight. The saloon is cribbed with smoke and wax and peeling wallpaper. Music is sparse and its sources identifiable. There’s a smallness evident, a sense memory of what it must have been like to be surrounded by a land you haven’t mapped, on the edge of a world whose borders are still a mystery. Cinematographer Alwin H. Küchler captures low-light interiors with an intimacy and grandeur reminiscent of Amadeus, amplifying the film’s verisimilitude and lending a fragile air to everything. As the characters’ relationships grow more complex—Hope and Donald discover a mutual attraction, while Lucia (Milla Jovovich), the local madam, finds herself shut out from Daniel’s life as he attempts to atone for his past—that fragility becomes additionally poignant. You realize just how little separates these people, or any of us, from the wilderness.
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Looking back at a film’s history is always interesting, as you try to contextualize what was happening upon release. The Claim is a beautiful and compelling movie, but it was also a story very much struggling to find an audience when it released at the tail end of December 2000. It arrived in theaters as part of that year’s glut of award bait, and it had the misfortune of competing with O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Traffic, and Miss Congeniality for space in the cultural conversation. Even at a time of year when character-driven dramas can find it easier to earn recognition, it was overlooked, earning less than $700,000 at the box office.
As a result, watching it now can feel like finding an artifact from a missing era, a feeling that’s wonderfully heightened by the graceful skill with which Winterbottom tells the tale of the hopeful, frustrated, tragic figures that animate the film. Every story of discovery is ultimately a story of loss: not just of the pieces of you that you sacrificed to survive the journey, but the disappearance of the mystery of what lies over the next horizon. We make our marks in dirt and rock and tell ourselves that we’ve discovered something, when all we’ve really done is disturb the scene. All one has to do is look at the abandoned towns and settlements scattered across what used to be the frontier. There’s no one there now, and the trees and rivers make their own claim, and that one always pays out.
“The Claim” is streaming on Tubi and PlutoTV, and is available for digital rental or purchase.
