Basic plot is that it's 19th century wild west times in the outback and a proper family has been slaughtered in their home by members of The Burns Gang. Ray Winstone (Sexy Beast) plays the frontier-taming Captain Stanley. At the start of the picture he captures middle and younger Burns brothers, and declares his intention to publicly hang the cowering baby bro nine days hence on Xmas, unless the moral-compass middle brother (the protean Guy Pearce of L.A. Confidential, Memento and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert) kills his homicidally psychopathic older brother (Danny Huston, recently seen in The Constant Gardner). Emily Watson puts in great work as the Captain's wife, as does John Hurt as an Irish-hating bounty hunter other performers leaning on Winstone or carrying out fiendish orders for either side, but the three men are the core of the drama, as you might imagine.
Winstone is simply one of the finest actors working in the English language. Captain Stanley is actually a liberalizing influence, come from England with his cultured wife to this desolate (and ungodly beautiful) landscape. He want the elder Burns dead because it's the next crucial step to civilizing this frontier, not for vengeance or any arbitrary punishment. Thanks to Winstone we feel Stanley's pain, how it separates him from a wife he so longs to be close to, how he's burning up inside fighting the political head of the settlement.
Meanwhile the (to my mind) perennially underrated Guy Pearce makes his way to the baddest of the badlands, the place the Aboriginals won't even go, where his brother and his band of cutthroats and rapists are holed up. The question behind Pearce's steely gaze is whether he'll betray his older brother, clearly the prime mover behind the slaughter, in order to save his fear-crazed but innocent younger brother. If blood is thicker than water, who's blood do you choose?
And there's plenty of the red stuff. Like the classic Sergio Leone Westerns, there's long, languid stretches or slow-burn suspense and awful contemplation, punctuated by bravura violence scenes that leave faces, fists and other implements soaked in the red stuff, dripping off. Nothing phony or forced, just the raw brutality of frontier life at a time of heightened moral conflict.
The director, John Hillcoat, has clearly studied his masters, and achieves a terrific look, even when we're watching men with flies clinging to the backs of their heads and necks in the noonday sun. The constant insect infestations are a stark reminder of how unfriendly these lands were, how inhospitable to civilized life.
But the big props go to second-time feature film screenwriter (both with music video graduate Hillcoat) Nick Cave, leader of The Bad Seeds, musician extraordinary. I'm not as educated in Cave's work as I might be, but one of my favorite of his albums is Murder Ballads, which explores the English and early American tradition of extremely graphic, morbid barroom songs telling homicide stories; brides losing their minds, bartenders shooting down customers, matricide and patricide, you name it.
The Proposition clearly benefits from Cave's earlier research and emotional connection to our homicidal history. Nation building at its finest. Consequently despite the pleasures of myth-making and classic movie pacing, there's a reality at the heart of the story, and it's the perennial John Ford question of what kind of man you need to break the frontier.
There's the tough but liberalizing force of Captain Stanley -- repping society and the law. There's the rough allegiances and resourcefulness of the outlaw, the man borne of the landscape and somehow trying to break free but hellishly captive to it. Then there's the transfixed stare out into the Outback of the older brother, the bad man, his mind a thousand unsettling worlds away, his actions frighteningly unpredictable, a self-styled patriarch in a psycho ward world.
It's a great set-up and the picture feels like top of the genre, a great big-screen experience. If it's a genre you've enjoyed in the past, go and have yourself a memorable experience.
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