The Claim (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.
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What critics compared The Claim to
If Vinterberg does not immediately spring to mind as a likely Hardy interpreter, it may be because the author’s countryman, Michael Winterbottom, seemed to hold exclusive Hardy mining rights for most of the past two decades, during which he delivered a superior “Jude,” an India-set “Tess” (“Trishna”) and a massively underrated version of “The Mayor of Casterbridge” (transposed to the American West and retitled “The Claim”).
But though this “Madding Crowd” is a fairly superficial rendering of Hardy, which doesn’t exhibit the same degree of wrestling with the source material that Polanski showed in “Tess” and Michael Winterbottom has repeatedly demonstrated, not only in his underrated “Jude” but in his more innovative takes on “The Claim” (based on “The Mayor of Casterbridge”) and “Trishna” (based on “Tess”), it nonetheless works on that more mundane level.
Mrs. Ben Stiller -- is decent but otherwise unremarkable as a reporter looking for a scoop, but both Milla Jovovich ("The Claim," "The Fifth Element") and Ben's real life father, Jerry Stiller ("Hairspray," TV's "Seinfeld"), are pretty much wasted in their respective roles.
But his other recent efforts -- "The Claim," "Code 46" -- have been tiresome and chilly.
Winterbottom may have the most diverse resume in film today, with movies about war reporting in Sarajevo ("Welcome to Sarajevo"), Manchester in the '70s ("24 Hour Party People"), Afghan refugees ("In This World"), futuristic ethics ("Code 46") andwhy not?the Wild, Wild West ("The Claim").