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 ustralia
. What fresh hell is this?"
So ponders the grizzled
Captain Morris Stanley (Ray Winstone, "Sexy
Beast"), a British Colonial Marshall, as
he casts his gaze over the uncompromising and
barren wasteland we now know as the Australian
Outback. After a nasty gunfight,
Stanley
has managed to capture two members of the infamous
Burns Gang, three brothers wanted for, among other
things, the rape and massacre of an entire family.
Problem is, the two
Stanley
has captured, the sniveling child Mikey (Richard
Wilson) and the brooding Charlie (Guy Pearce,
"Memento"),
are not the ones he really wants. The real prize
is Arthur (Danny Huston, "The Constant
Gardener"), the oldest and most depraved of
the three. Determined to bring law and order to
the lawless, Captain Stanley makes Charlie a
horrible proposition: find and kill Arthur, or
Mikey will hang in nine days -- Christmas Day, to
be exact. Stuck between the proverbial rock and a
hard place, Charlie sets out to find his brother,
but the journey leads where neither man could have
imagined.
Set in 1880's
Australia
, director John Hillcoat's "The
Proposition" is one of the most vicious
Revisionist Westerns I've ever seen. It follows
the dark themes of love, violence and redemption
in an ugly world that we've seen in the westerns
of Clint Eastwood, Sam Peckinpah and even the
later ones by Sergio Leone, but none of those
films are as merciless and emotionally draining as
Hillcoat's. "The Proposition" is a film
of unending sadness and desperation. "I will
civilize this place," pronounces
Stanley
with an air of defiance, to which Charlie
incredulously replies, "What the fuck are you
talking about, Stan?" Desperate times,
desperate people and desperate actions.
The dying glimmer of hope
personified by Captain Stanley, who sees himself
as
Australia
's instrument of salvation, is virtually snuffed
out by the reality of the lawless wasteland. The
ugliness of upholding the law in a lawless land is
contrasted by Morris's home life. Tended to by his
porcelain wife Martha (Emily Watson, "Equilibrium"),
the pair do their best to act the proper British
couple in the tiny piece of normality they are
afforded within the four walls of their home. The
incongruity of the Stanleys' little slice of
heaven standing alone in a barren expanse that
stretches as far as the eye can see provides the
film with its only bit of levity. The interplay
between Morris and Martha is handled with a level
of tenderness that almost seems out of place in a
film so decidedly mean, but the juxtaposition of
these elements lays a sturdy foundation for
"The Proposition".
The performances are solid
all around. Winstone is always reliable as a
villain barely hiding a great deal of violence
beneath his genial façade. Here, however, he
plays that character inside out, desperately
trying to maintain his genial façade against the
very obvious violence around him. Watson is
excellent as his foil. A proper Victorian woman,
she bravely soldiers alongside her man knowing
full well that she is totally unprepared to face
the harsh realities of her adopted home.
Pearce continues to impress
with his portrayal of brooding and conflicted
characters. Pearce's Charlie is a man who has been
thoroughly defeated by life and is sustained
solely by love for his younger brother and hatred
of everything else. He is essentially the
resolution of Pearce's character progression from
"LA Confidential" and
"Memento." As the demented Arthur,
Huston gives a performance of uncommonly
structured chaos. Arthur is the lowest kind of
human, willing and able to debase those around him
in the worst ways for the sheer thrill of it. Yet
there is a sort of nobility to his 'freedom at any
cost' attitude that peeks through his
blood-crusted veneer. It is the way Huston brings
out this quality in Arthur that makes the
difficulty of Charlie's task apparent to the
audience and even manages to coax a sliver of
sympathy.
The Australian Outback is a
character with its own story to tell. There are
few places on this earth as brutal and
inhospitable, and every Australian film I've seen
treats it as a place to be feared, yet one that
hides great beauty within. The Aborigines who
somehow manage to live there treat it as a living
thing; one not to be trifled with. This stands in
stark contrast to the White settlers who take it
upon themselves, with great futility, to conquer
it. These ideas are reflected in a brilliant scene
between Captain Stanley and his Aborigine house
servant. In the end, those that are not destroyed
by the Outback are warped by it into something
worse than human. The land is the great equalizer,
where good and evil are as fickle as the dusty
winds that blow across it.
Destruction and violence
overwhelms "The Proposition". They are
such pervasive elements that they nearly block out
everything else. The physical brutality on
display, including the worst scourging this side
of "The
Passion of the Christ," is hard to take
in many instances, and is exceeded only by the
emotional brutality. The sheer heartlessness of
the characters is astonishing, yet is wholly
believable given the time and place they live. But
while the themes explored are intriguing, there
isn't the expected depth. The characters are set
at the beginning of the film, and none have
changed at the end.
"The Proposition"
is as cruel a film as you are likely to come
across, but it is also a compelling one. As
revolting as the characters and their actions are
on screen, you can't take your eyes away from it.
The film's power is its steadfast moral ambiguity.
Where do the lines between justice, revenge and
survival blur? The film leaves it to the viewer to
decide, which makes it all the more frightening.
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