GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW

Although Michael Winterbottom has put his name on a bunch of noteworthy-to-superb films in what seems like a very short period of time, he's the kind of director who tends to be undervalued by critics whose cinematic sensibilities were formed by the auteur theory—critics such as . . . well, me. This theory, which was championed in postwar France by a group of firebrand critics, posits directors as the ultimate “authors” of films and values to a high degree the personal signature (or style) a given director leaves on a film. (It is perhaps no accident that many of the French writers who took up this theory went on to become directors themselves.) I've gotten something substantial out of all the Winterbottom movies I've seen—the tragic Jude, the moving but bracingly unsentimental Welcome to Sarajevo, and the urban slice-of-life Wonderland among them—but when time came for me to check out The Claim, I didn't say to myself, “Yeah! A new Michael Winterbottom picture,” the way I'd say, “Yeah! A new Lynch/Cronenberg/Godard/Rivette/Campion/Scorsese picture.” His work does tend to lack a discernible personal signature, or what those who find personal signatures obtrusive would call “fingerprints.” But The Claim is so good that I'm thinking maybe I'm wrong about the lack of a personal signature . . . or that maybe I should just get over it.

One easily recognizable Winterbottom trait is his knack for making period pieces register with an immediacy that one doesn't normally associate with period pieces. His Jude, adapted from Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, depicted the emotional conflicts of that story with a painful rawness, and Winterbottom's detailed, unflinching portrayal of the dire physical circumstances in which the film's characters ended up was pal pable; Masterpiece Theatre it was not. So, too, with The Claim, which is based on Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge but moves the novel's action to California's Sierra Neva da region in the mid-19th cen tu ry. Asking the eternal question, “What does it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world but lose his own soul?” (and also quoting Percy Shelley's Ozymandias to good effect), the picture begins with the arrival of three different groups to the town of Kingdom Come: a young railroad surveyor with his own party; a bevy of new blood to reinvigorate the local brothel; and a mother and daughter who claim to be relations of the town's benevolent but iron-willed patriarch, one Mr. Dillon (Peter Mullan). The surveyor, Dalglish (Wes Bentley), holds Kingdom Come's future in his hands, for he will decide if the railroad comes through the town or not. The town's sheriff gives Dillon his dismissive judgment of Dalglish early on: “He's just a young pup. We'll get no trouble from him.” Dillon's so sure that things are going to work out fine that he doesn't even shrug when Dalglish resists his initial attempt at a bribe. Dillon's sitting better than pretty: Lucia (Milla Jovovich), the impossibly beautiful chief entertainer at Kingdom Come's saloon, is hopelessly in love with him, and he's got more gold bars sitting in his bank than he could ever hope to spend. All he's got to do, it seems, is lie back and let good fortune—and Lucia—ravish him some more.

But that's not going to happen. The mother and daughter who came in with Dalglish's party are more than just “marriage relations” to Dillon; they are, in fact, the wife and daughter Dillon abandoned years before, giving them away to a weary prospector in exchange for the mining claim that yielded Dillon his fortune. That man is dead; Elena (Nastassja Kinski), the wife, is dying, and she wants Dillon to provide for the daughter, Hope (Sarah Polley), who not only doesn't know that Dillon is actually her father but is also falling in love with Dalglish.

As Keanu Reeves might say, “Whoa.” This is an endlessly wrenching and compelling story, and Winterbottom and screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce tell it beautifully and—again, as with Jude—unflinchingly. The dialogue here is spare, practically rudimentary (interesting that Boyce also scripted Pandaemonium, a picture about two rather more verbose types, Coleridge and Wordsworth), and the actors, particularly Bentley, often speak contemporary American English. But Winterbottom, cinematographer Alwin Kuchler, and production designer Mark Tildesley create such a convincing—and convincingly chilly—world of snowbound frontier hardship (and elegance—the multiple candles of the saloon, the ornate, beautifully furnished house that Dillon has brought down a slope for Elena and Hope to live with him in are wonders to behold) that it doesn't matter; someone could start talking into a cell phone in the middle of a scene and it wouldn't break the dark mood.

Winterbottom's a brisk storyteller, using a lot of quick cuts without ever devolving into a dislocating frenzy, but he knows when and how to let his movie breathe. There's a beautiful scene in which Dillon, scarcely able to believe that his family has been returned to him, goes to his bank to pick up some gold. Dillon is ushered into a dark room. There's a shot of a match firing up and lighting a wick; a shot of the lamp illuminating a couple of bars of gold; a shot from a little farther back, showing that there's a whole hell of a lot of gold in there; then a medium close-up of Mullan, face bathed in deep yellow light, his eyes as black as the room was seconds ago; and he exhales deeply. His sigh says volumes about the character—his performance as Dillon is first among equals in this beautifully acted movie—and says everything the movie wants and needs to say at this point. It's moviemaking of the first order, and Winterbottom, auteur or not, is a master of it.