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Michael Cimino's much-maligned epic western "Heaven's Gate" had one spectacular scene with ice-skating cowboys. To those of us (ie all of us) whose view of the American West comes from movies, this seemed amusingly surreal. Yet ice-skating was in reality a popular pastime enjoyed by gunslingers, and this came to mind while watching Michael Winterbottom's "The Claim", which includes both operatic singing and public readings. They take place in an emerging California amidst the extreme landscapes of the Sierra Nevada, where a rough'n'tumble town provides the setting for a tale of love, passion, and redemption.
Dreams (epitomised by an ambitious railroad engineer) collide with greed (the town's kingpin who hides a guilty secret) as locals consider the impact of the new railway, and a family (led by an ailing mother) struggles for survival. In fact, by the look of them, so does most of the populace. The sheer grind of endurance certainly comes through in most scenes.
Sadly Michael Winterbottom, in aiming for the epic, is too often trite. He fails to infuse the small moments of people's lives with emotion of any kind, often a result of his mistaken preference for short, choppy scenes, too many of which are inconsequential. Even sequences of striking originality (like the kingpin's house being hauled to a new location) are shot in a perfunctory way with the result that the film is flattened by flatness. Despite the efforts of Peter Mullan, Wes Bentley, and Nastassja Kinski (all of whom enjoy some lively moments), the characters are generally underdeveloped. By the time real drama arrives, and the actors are no longer marooned, it really is much too little, far too late.
