The Claim

After a series of interesting near-misses, the alarmingly prolific British director Michael Winterbottom returned to a tried and true source: Thomas Hardy. But rather than a straightforward adaptation in the manner of JUDE, he attempts to transform The Mayor of Casterbridge, Hardy's novel about life in provincial Wessex, into a parable of America's westward expansion and the men who built short-lived empires in the wilderness. Winterbottom and screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce prune the plot and shift whatever action is left to 19th-century California, where Daniel Dillon (Peter Mullan), the self-anointed king of the portentously named town of Kingdom Come, is...