The Claim: Thomas Hardy in the Sierra Nevada

Cold, cold, cold. That's the terrain of The Claim?the Sierra Nevada mountains during the 1870s at the height of winter. Cold also describes the feeling summoned by this technically ambitious and sometimes entrancing historical epic. By choosing to rework Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge as a tale of the American gold rush, then setting it against a canvas of brutal winter weather, director Michael Winterbottom (jokes, anyone?) was just asking for trouble. The forbidding frontier panoramas invite comparisons to earlier movies, from Greed and The Gold Rush up through Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller, a white-and-amber opium dream of sex, money and death. And if the echoes of other movies don't distract you, the stunningly vast and obviously difficult setting should do the trick.

While watching The Claim, you can't help wondering how hard it must have been to shoot this international coproduction. Winterbottom's favorite recurring image, a long-shot of flea-speck settlers against towering ivory mountains, invites you to ponder not just man's smallness in the face of nature, but how in the hell Winterbottom managed to transport the stars' trailers above the tree line.

You might also be reminded, in a roundabout way, of Werner Herzog's bizarre 1982 jungle epic Fitzcarraldo, a film about slaves brutalized by a demented master that somehow became a documentary about a film crew brutalized by a demented director. (Les Blank's nonfiction feature about the making of Fitzcarraldo, Burden of Dreams, is both brilliant and redundant.) I never read any reports of mutiny or madness on the part of Winterbottom's crew, which is amazing considering that it was shot in the Canadian Rockies during peak snow season; in popular folklore, a band of cocky travelers plus snowfall equals Donner Party. Somehow he and his people made it through. If the results had been anywhere near worth the effort, I'd probably be calling this the best movie of the year. Alas, The Claim is like most of the Winterbottom movies I've seen: fresh subject matter and style, honorable motives, but lacking narrative focus and eager to dwell on minor matters at the expense of the big picture.

The opening is promising enough: a little caravan arrives in Kingdom Come, a snowy High Sierra gold town, bearing at least three semi-mysterious characters. The most outwardly heroic of the lot, Dalglish (Wes Bentley), is a surveyor for the Pacific Railroad who has come to examine Kingdom Come and decide whether the train should stop there. He arrives at the same moment as a mother and daughter, Elena and Hope (Nastassja Kinski and Sarah Polley), who have an implied but obviously deep connection to the town's founder, the gold tycoon Daniel Dillon (Peter Mullan). Mullan butters up the young surveyor with the services of two prostitutes; one of them is Dillon's wise, unself-consciously sexy young mistress, Lucia (Milla Jovovich), who sings right purty for a whorehouse madam.

What grabs you about the opening act?what grabbed me, anyway?is The Claim's matter-of-fact, quasidocumentary style. As in his other movies?notably the political drama Welcome to Sarajevo and his other Thomas Hardy epic, Jude?Winterbottom works against the natural spectacle of his settings, costumes and crowd scenes. He puts the camera at ground level, walking through the town via a handheld camera or watching from a great distance like a voyeur peeking through a spyglass. This fantastic movie town was obviously a chore to build, but Winterbottom treats it the way a roving camera crew might treat a long-existing community they just happened to stumble into. Michael Nyman's mournful, cyclical, too-ripe score says, "This is a fever dream about real people"; yet the nonfiction-style camerawork, numerous jump cuts, terse performances, credibly frayed costumes and unglamorously cluttered soundtrack push the whole thing in the direction of hyperrealism. We are invited to eavesdrop with our eyes and ears?a noble offer that period pictures rarely bother to make.

As in historical films by Altman, Peckinpah and Arthur Penn, incidental touches remind us, over and over, that history isn't just a beautiful diorama full of lovingly molded figurines, but another time and place. The citizens of Kingdom Come smoke, drink and curse. Those who speak English tend to have an accent, planting the America-is-a-nation-of-immigrants theme directly in your fascinated ear. The women's lovely clothes are worn down a bit by the realities of frontier life. The male laborers, many of whom traveled hundreds or even thousands of miles to stake claims, crave camaraderie and casual sex, and between the saloon owners and their prostitutes, both urges are satisfied (at least on payday). Not bad for a sequence that amounts to a lot of expository throat-clearing.

Alas, once Winterbottom's plot wagon gets rolling, it heads in four directions at once, and the wheels come off. Every one of his stories holds interest and promise?Dillon's attempts to use Lucia to get to the newcomers, Hope and Elena's tantalizingly undefined quest to connect with Dillon, Hope's budding romance with Dalglish. The most thematically crucial plotline?which I won't disclose even though Winterbottom deals with it fairly early in a flashback?ought to be wrenchingly powerful. But the pieces don't come together, and the whole picture doesn't quite come into focus.

By the end of the first hour, you will probably find yourself wondering what, exactly, the point is, aside from demonstrating the filmmaker's casual mastery of certain techniques and his warts-and-all philosophy of drama. He and screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce clearly want to make some sort of statement about the corrupting effects of greed and pride, and the time-tested American economic cycle that turns successful, assimilated immigrants against socially awkward newcomers. But the result is more along the lines of, "Things were rough back then, people were mean to each other for no reason and you were much more likely to die young." When a raging forest fire materializes in the middle of snowy woods?and later, when one of the characters pulls a Fitzcarraldo?you're less likely to think about the cruelties of God and man than the question of how on Earth Winterbottom got so many talented people to risk frostbite. The actors come off well?particularly the hard, enigmatic, strangely touching Mullan and the affable, sexy Jovovich, one of those shamelessly manufactured international waifs who never impressed me before.

But in Winterbottom's movies, the actors almost always do excellent work. Either he's a great actor's director, or else his peculiar working method (grand ambitions, naturalistic style) forces them to be as unself-conscious as possible, for fear of being caught doing something false. Either way, his performers respond with a beguiling mix of spontaneity and control.

The problem is that the performances don't build toward something. As in mediocre Altman films, and much of Altman disciple Alan Rudolph's work, you're stuck watching gifted people in interesting situations do the thespian equivalent of origami?folding little moments into lovely paper shapes that can be blown away with a sigh. One gets the sense that Winterbottom, a potentially major talent, has fallen into the Spike Lee-Paul Thomas Anderson trap, which sacrifices narrative coherence on the altar of personal style. Like Lee and Anderson, it might not kill him to wait a few years between movies and work on the scripts a bit more. The Claim, more so than his previous movies, seems brick-solid at first, but it soon proves as dramatically unstable as a mansion built into the side of an avalanche-prone mountain; the film's grubby vision of frontier life, however haunting in places, melts from the mind like snow.