2000 Directed by Michael Winterbottom
A prospector sells his wife and daughter to another gold miner for the rights to a gold mine. Twenty years later, the prospector is a wealthy man who owns much of the old west town named Kingdom Come. But changes are brewing and his past is coming back to haunt him. A surveyor and his crew scouts the town as a location for a new railroad line and a young woman suddenly appears in the town and is evidently the man's daughter.
Revolution Films Arts Council of England Alliance Atlantis Pathé Pictures International DB Entertainment Canal+ Grosvenor Park Productions United Artists BBC Film
Le bianche tracce della vita, Vykoupení, Rédemption, Vykúpenie, Claim na hluchém potoku, Riqueza Perdida, Das Reich und die Herrlichkeit, El perdón, Królowie życia, הטענה, Золотая пыль, Aranybánya, Zamolčana preteklost, 더 클레임, El perdó, めぐり逢う大地
USA
Los Angeles
USAR
UK15
Canada
Canada
UK
USA
I'll let you into a secret. Whenever I watch a film and it opens with the Pathe ident, I not only immediately associate it with 24 Hour Party People, I also feel a bit disappointed that I'm not actually about to watch 24 Hour Party People. This is especially frustrating when the subsequent film proves disappointing because, dammit, I could have been watching 24 Hour Party People!
The link here is less personal and eccentric however, because this is a film from Michael Winterbottom, Andrew Eaton and Frank Cottrell-Boyce, the director, producer and writer of 24 Hour Party People. Indeed, this was the film that they were making in frozen wilds of the Canadian Rockies when they decided that their…
Lovely wintry, snow-capped western. This is absolutely a Blank Check movie, what studio honestly thought a slowburn western starring Wes Bentley was going to make any money? (it cost around $20 million and ended up making $622,000, never appearing in more than 29 theaters at a time). But I’m glad we have it. There’s very little violence, and it’s even lacking in horses, but it’s an absorbing film about trying to make up for the sins of the past. Even though Bentley is positioned as the star, it’s very much Peter Mullan and Sarah Polley’s film. Their charged relationship, with her mother stuck in the middle, is the standout. There’s a bunch of great images here, and it’s the kind of film where you can sense the difference between practicality and something more effects-heavy. The way real flames look when burning next to real snow, you can’t fake the tangibility. It just feels different. Great score too.
170/200
Ten years is a long time and I am one lucky fellow. Anyway, I wish we had more ambitious literary westerns.
www.rogerebert.com/mzs/the-unloved-part-120-the-claim
www.rogerebert.com/features/the-tenth-anniversary-of-the-unloved
The goldrush in Alaska some years befor Jack London´s "call of the wild". In the time between 1849-67 some people are trying their luck under pretty bad conditions.
Really great landscape recordings that bring the grim atmosphere and the cold in the brutal winter on the mountains across very well! The cold crept under my skin.
But for my taste after the first 20 minutes the staging is much to slow and contains too little thrill or tension. Therefore some times I started doing something else.
A shame, because location, decoration, actors and camera are really great.
Lejos ya los ecos del fenómeno Unforgiven, el cambio de siglo vino acompañado de heterogéneos acercamientos al wéstern por parte de directores consagrados con mayor o menor vocación de autores.
Si con Ride With The Devil, Ang Lee supo encontrar su voz sin caer en un remedo de Ford, Peckinpah o el Gordon Douglas de Rio Conchos, Michael Winterbottom se nos antoja ligeramente más errático en The Claim, con esa herencia nada disimulada de los modos narrativos de Robert Altman y la épica colectiva de Michael Cimino. Un legítimo intento de sostenerse en una idea del wéstern que no pudo tener continuidad en la industria.
Es interesante la dialéctica que establece el film entre la hegemonía de los pioneros, auténticos…
So, this is a romance western that's pretty forgettable. It has a good cast but the story is pretty bland. Milla looks gorgeous here though.
A desperate man sells his wife and baby for a mining claim and years later tries to win them back while helping build a railroad. Interesting story and a great cast including Wes Bentley, Milla Jovovich, Sarah Polley and Nastassja Kinski. Period piece’s are not usually my favourites, but a good story overcomes a lot.
The Claim is a gritty revisionist western from director Michael Winterbottom that does a magnificent job of capturing a rough yet beautiful time and place. This may be it's strongest attribute when it comes to world building but it's one of many and not a small one. It's also a reimagining of Thomas Hardy's The Mayor Of Casterbridge that transplants the original story to a snowy California mining town during the late eighteen hundreds and details the decades later fallout from a gold prospector's greedy pact to abandon his family for financial prosperity. Peter Mullan does typically fine, fierce work as the compromised lead and he receives strong support from Milla Jovovich, Wes Bentley, Nastassja Kinski and Sarah Polley as…
This is a version of Thomas Hardy's 'The Mayor of Casterbridge' placed in a Western setting. Daniel Dillon, young and hot-headed, and greedy for gold, sells his sickly Polish wife (Nastassja Kinski) and their baby daughter and goes on to practically run a town.
Twenty years later a woman and daughter come to the town and it looks as if Dillon's good fortune is about to crumble and his past catch up with him. In a bleak and snowy setting Dillon and his mistress (Milla Jonovich) live a prosperous life, waiting for the railroad to come through their town bringing the visitors and trade the town needs to survive.
This film departs quite a bit from Hardy's source, but it…
The first half in particular sets a rugged, old-timey Western frontier mood that feels freshly-imagined yet/but/and lived-in and gritty and real.
