Ray Pride

Life was hard during the California Gold Rush; contemporary art film distribution may be slightly tougher.

A movie favorite from 2000, "The Claim," opened briefly in Los Angeles for awards consideration, gets a belated release this week, but its tiny, uninformative print ads are unlikely to convince the unaware of the graces and grace notes of Michael Winterbottom's latest stylistic diversion. While it escaped the holiday rush and crush of movies, would-be arthouse supplier United Artists may not be up to the task of getting audiences in to this somber gem. (Then again, what I take as somber may be merely glum to others). The advance ads bear glowing reviews from New York long-lead reviewers who aren't classic blurb-hounds, but I wonder who will be tempted to see "The Claim," a haunted western romance, adapted from a classic novel, derivative of Robert Altman's "McCabe and Mrs. Miller," yet its own very stubborn and gorgeous creature.

Adapted by frequent Winterbottom collaborator Frank Cottrell Boyce from Thomas Hardy's "The Mayor of Casterbridge," "The Claim" charts the tragic reunion of a family during the California Gold Rush. Dillon (Peter Mullan), wearied from months in the wilderness, sells his wife and child for a land claim. Years later, he's the mayor (and owner) of a thriving settlement teeming with miners and prostitutes, clad in the raiment of power and money. The baron of Kingdom Come has a young mistress (Milla Jovovich), a Portuguese-born singer-madam—the nineteenth century equivalent of a trophy wife. Enter his once-wife (Nastassja Kinski), older, ill, and their daughter (Sarah Polley). And enter the railroad's advance men, looking to bring this barren backwater into the modern age, led by charismatic young Dalgliesh (Wes Bentley). Everyone is at the frontiers of geography, money and sex.

The production design of the town is impressive for the film's restrained budget, reported at $15 million, yet at least one genius stroke by Winterbottom was to hire cinematographer Alwin Kuchler, who with only a handful of credits has made a mark as a brilliant artificer of space. Kuchler is particularly sophisticated in the range of focal lengths he employs, a knack on show in the work that got him noticed, Lynne Ramsay's terrific shorts and her brilliant "Ratcatcher," which is only starting to play across the country. The palette is telling as well—blues, gray-greens of relentless, hard northern light, the blanch and parch of cold that slows the blood and stills the soul. The light alone suggests you could hole up in Kingdom Come, nurture a fixation on the cruelest parts of your past in these frozen parts. This is stark, unburnished light, capturing the weft of relentless snow-cold on gorgeous, sculptured faces. The weather is as ruthless as greed, snow sleeting horizontally over the widescreen Panavision frame.

These actors are all "charactahs" the way Terrence Malick's movies insist—could you not look at Sarah Polley, Wes Bentley, Milla Jovovich, Nastassja Kinski, Peter Mullan, all day long? This is why it would be a cruel misfortune to think that movies are but plot and sentiment. They are also Polley's small teeth in her gentle, generous smile. Bentley's darkly blue, querulous eyes, under a knit brow and knit hat. Sweat on Jovovich's post-coital jawline. Or in one of the movie's most memorable images, a horse on fire, shimmering in an envelope of CGI flame, liquid as wind against a backdrop of insulted white snowbanks.

There is also a enigmatic Michael Nyman score, the veteran composer in atypical, restive, restrained form. If the CD were out, I would have burned out on its melodies by now. (Instead, I am listening to his score for Winterbottom's "Wonderland" as I write.) There is a passage where a survey party hies to the highest mountains, and the magnificent sobriety of the score lingers in memory. Like the film, it is both grave and tender.

In the end, this is Hardy by way of "The Great Gatsby" by way of "McCabe and Mrs. Miller." "The Claim" seems like a movie that will be appreciated over time. In a manner similar to Bill Forsyth's dignified "Housekeeping," it is a generous, melancholy look at the human condition that could reveal itself to be some kind of masterpiece if we take the time to look and listen as Winterbottom, Cottrell Boyce and Kuchler have. (2001-04-19)

Also by Ray Pride

MULLETING IT OVER
David Spade's newest star vehicle, likable, headlong and often nonsensical, finds the small comic playing an obstinate, put-upon janitor in acid-washed jeans and a ratty mullet wig, who lives for Van Halen and a dream of rejoining his family -- who deserted him at a Grand Canyon rest stop when he was only 8 years old
(2001-04-12)

WORLDS KNOWN
A mirror of language and a dance of desire, the culmination of "The Beauty of the Husband"'s performance takes the breath away.
(2001-04-05)

BLOWN
"Blow," more than six years in the planning, is a pop tapestry of urge and need. The flip side of "Traffic," Ted Demme's fifth feature embellishes the life story of George Jung, the most profligate of drug dealers, who, working in the late 1970s and early 1980s with Colombia druglord Pablo Escobar, filled our fair land with kilos of "disco shit -- pure as the driven snow."
(2001-04-05)

THIS AMERICAN SO-CALLED LIFE
A thirteen-part series, drawn from 2,800 hours of video capturing the lives of fourteen students, their teachers and family, over the 1999-2000 school year at Chicago suburban Highland Park High School, it surpasses its creators' claim that they've made the nonfiction equivalent of "My So-Called Life."
(2001-03-29)

WHOLE CLOTH
(2001-03-29)

COLOR BIND
(2001-03-22)

WORDS ON PICTURES
(2001-03-22)

OFF CAMERA
(2001-03-22)

MANNY FROM HEAVEN
(2001-03-08)

RAINSTORMS OF WORDS
(2001-03-01)

MEET JOE BLOW
(2001-03-01)

KNOWING DICK
(2001-02-22)

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