(2000) Set in the Sierra Nevadas of California in 1867, Director Michael Winterbottom's bleak, bitter film, inspired by Thomas Hardy's novel (also a 2003 film) The Mayor of Casterbridge, could be a companion piece to McCabe and Mrs Miller with its harsh, wintry environment and brutal incidents.

Along with a wagon load of women for the whorehouse in Kingdom Come, a girl and her ailing mother arrive in an attempt to reclaim a piece of the past. Other recent arrivals, Donald Dalglish (Wes Bentley), a Scotsman working for the Central Pacific Railroad, and his crew, surveying and blasting a passage through the mountains, are eager to make acquaintances with the girls. The town belongs to Daniel Dillon (Peter Mullan), who expects the railroad to bring great prosperity to Kingdom Come.

Remaining in the hotel room as a convalescent, Elena Burn (Nastassja Kinski) hands her daughter Hope (Sarah Polley) a necklace with a cross to give to Mr Dillon. He immediately realizes its significance: in a blizzard eighteen years earlier as one of the '49ers he came to Kingdom Come where he met Mr Burn and exchanged his wife and baby daughter for a rich gold claim. Elena finally appeals to Dillon to provide for Hope.

Dillon turns over the deed to the saloon and a quantity of gold to his mistress Lucia (Milla Jovovich), who at first thinks he's lusting after Hope. After hauling into town a beautiful house, Dillon, who up until then had confined himself to Burn's original old shack, says with genuine guilt and remorse to Elena before wedding her again: "Just one thing - I don't want her [Hope] to know what I done."

Hope's affections are for Dalglish who has taken up with Lucia. When he feels double-crossed, discovering that the railroad will bypass Kingdom Come, Dillon and his men go after Dalglish.

Unlike Hardy's novel, a significant departure in the film, from Frank Cottrell Boyce's screenplay, is that Hope really is Dillon's daughter, whereas Casterbridge's mayor Michael Henchard discovers that his child died after he sold, while drunk, the infant and his wife to a sailor named Newson for five guineas; Newson, thought to have died at sea, then returns to claim his daughter Elizabeth-Jane, who marries the mayor's Scottish assistant, Donald Farfrae. Using wordplay, Boyce, does have Elena's husband return to reclaim Kingdom Come. Another coincidence of names is that Michael Winterbottom suffered frostbite on his ears during the filming.

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
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