 | | | | by Sandy Starr |
Thomas Hardy's novels, and much of his poetry, seem locked in the author's semi-imaginary mid-Victorian Wessex landscape. So how have the makers of The Claim managed to turn it successfully into a snowbound Western?
| Maybe because Hardy's work appears to offer meagre scope for adaptation, previous films of his work - such as John Schleisinger's Far From the Madding Crowd (1967), Roman Polanski's Tess (1979) and Phil Agland's recent The Woodlanders (1998) - are relatively faithful to the original texts. So it has taken some courage for director Michael Winterbottom and screenwriter Frank Cottrell-Boyce to take The Mayor of Casterbridge, one of Hardy's best-known novels, and adapt it into The Claim.
| Winterbottom's previous adaptation of Hardy's work, in the 1996 film Jude, made uncompromising changes to the source material. Jude the Obscure - Hardy's final novel - is relentlessly pessimistic to the point of misanthropy, and while Hardy handles the grim sequence of events well, a wholesale transplantation to film would have caused it to verge on the comedic. As it is, the simultaneous death of all of the title character's children midway through the film stretches our credibility. Winterbottom wisely omits the final seven chapters of the book, in which Jude remarries his first wife and dies gradually from illness and neglect, and leaves us instead with a more open-ended (but still harrowing) conclusion.
| But in The Claim, Winterbottom and Cottrell-Boyce take even greater liberties with their source material. Although The Mayor of Casterbridge is clearly the kernel of the plot, where the filmmakers choose to depart from the novel or make additions of their own they do so without hesitation. By changing the names of the novel's characters, they seem to be asking us to accept their film as a work in its own right. And as a work in its own right, it stands up well.
| The story's setting is no longer Victorian Wessex, but the Sierra Nevada mountains of California. Hardy's Michael Henchard, the hayweaver who sells his wife and child for five guineas in a drunken stupor at a country fair, becomes Daniel Dillon, a gold prospector who performs the same drunken act in a lonely mountain cabin in return for a claim on the land. Dillon's deed is more ruthless than Henchard's, performed as it is in mountain solitude rather than in a rural bustle. And whereas Henchard betters himself through becoming mayor of nearby Casterbridge, Dillon redeems his act by building Kingdom Come, the town he comes to preside over.
| The environment of The Claim is as much a star of the film as the lead actors. Actually shot in the mountains of Canada, the film crew built Kingdom Come from scratch over the course of three months. Watching the film's crisp images of thick snow and ice, dotted with plain wooden buildings, you can almost feel the cold through the cinema screen. The mountains isolate the characters and render their actions more stark, their relationships more fragile.
| The transposition of Hardy's novel to a new country is, again, a greater liberty than Winterbottom ever took with Jude. But Jude the Obscure's setting is closer to contemporary life than the setting of any other Hardy novel. It moves quickly from the countryside into busy towns and cities and features rail as an established form of travel, whereas the spread of railways is but a distant prospect in earlier work by Hardy. As Irving Howe writes in his study of the author, Jude the Obscure is 'Hardy's most distinctively "modern" work' (1). Winterbottom seems intrigued by Hardy's engagement with modernity, and setting The Claim in California on the cusp of industrial change is perhaps his way of pursuing that interest.
| | | The film shows a world where a single careless action is likely to have lifelong consequences |
| Character relationships in The Claim survive from Hardy's novel, but context and motivation are altered. Scotsman Donald Farfrae, who brings mechanised agriculture to old-fashioned Casterbridge, becomes Scotsman Donald Dalglish, who is assessing the possibility of building a railroad through Kingdom Come. Dalglish is played by Wes Bentley, now famous as misunderstood adolescent Ricky Fitts in the Oscar-winning American Beauty. Natassja Kinski, who plays Dillon's dying wife, carries with her the ghost of her lead role in Polanski's Tess.
| The crucial role, of Dillon himself, is played with tragic determination by Peter Mullan. Watching him, I was reminded of Alan Bates' stony-faced performance as Michael Henchard in the BBC's 1978 TV adaptation of The Mayor of Casterbridge. While that earlier version (adapted by Dennis Potter before he found fame with Pennies from Heaven) preserved all of Henchard's wretchedness from the novel, Dillon is a nobler figure. Winterbottom spares us Henchard's protracted decline, just as he spared us Jude's decline in his earlier Hardy adaptation. Whereas in The Mayor of Casterbridge Henchard returns to liquor and becomes the town drunk after 21 years of abstinence, in The Claim Dillon's demise is swift and pointed, and he never turns back to drink.
| While liberal adaptations of literature are often exercises in contrivance or pretension, The Claim demonstrates what fine results can be had when a text is adapted with deliberation and care. The London Evening Standard's Alexander Walker is unfair when he says in his review of the film that 'There are actually two films here, running abreast, but neither helping the other' (2). If anything, The Claim proves that the plot of a Thomas Hardy novel can have mileage beyond its Wessex confines, and that the Western genre can benefit immensely from the injection of a new influence.
| Both The Claim and the original work of Thomas Hardy hold a particular interest for us because both depict a world that is alien to us today. The setting of The Claim may differ from what we are accustomed to in Hardy's work, but the film still shows us a world where a single careless action is likely to have lifelong consequences.
| A man who sells his wife and child at the age of 21, spends the next 19 years contemplating the shameful deed, and then suddenly has to pay for it, is a grimly fascinating spectacle for a modern audience. The morality of action and the extent of its consequences are no longer so reassuringly clear-cut.
| (1) Irving Howe, Thomas Hardy New York: The Macmillan Company 1967
(2) Read the Evening Standard review
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