“The Claim” is very loosely based on Thomas Hardy’s “The Mayor of Casterbridge.” The location has been moved from England to the Sierra Nevada mountains in California as the Transcontinental Railroad is being built. I truly respect the screenwriter for such an imaginative adaptation. Daniel Dillon runs the town Kingdom Come as he owns most of the businesses and land. A sick mother and her daughter come into town claiming to be relations of Dillon. We find out through a flashback that Dillon used to be married to the woman, whom he traded for the claim that led to the wealth that built the town. Also new to town are the engineers for the railroad who are here to decide which way the railroad will come through. The town’s fortunes, and those of Dillon himself, are deeply tied to the engineers, especially the head engineer, a young man named Dalglish.

Having read (and loved) the book, the first part of the film was fascinating to me to see the inventive liberties that screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce took – the main ideas of the book are here but different. Dillon wants to make right for how he sold his family when he was drunk and poor, but can he risk telling his daughter who she really is without ruining her love for him? Dalglish is the catalus that leads to yet another crisis in Dillon’s life – will the railroad be built through the town causing it to thrive, or will it be built in another area?

The cinematography is beautiful. The acting (by an international class that well portrays the melting pot of the American west) is well done. I tried hard not to constantly compare it to the book, which has so many twists and turns of fate it is almost impossible to fit into a 2 hour film. But, I felt in the end let down by Dalglish’s character. “The Mayor of Casterbridge” rotates around the constantly changing relationship between Henchard (Dillon) and Farfrae (Dalglish) – from a father/son relationship to one of mortal enemies. That element is missing from the film, even though the film involves a shoot-out between the Dillon’s Kingdom Come townies and Dalglish’s railroad men. I also never really bought into his relationship with Dillon’s daughter, Hope. The chemistry between Wes Bentley and Milla Jovovich, who plays Dillon’s mistress, was much more palpable. Also, Dillon’s fall was too rapid for me, involving just one headstrong and impractical decision instead of a series of them. I felt the film lingered too much on the dying mother, time which could have been better used, how many scenes do we really need of a woman coughing up blood and her daughter taking over nursing from Dillon?

Overall, a solid film, a different kind of adaptation and a different kind of Western.