Great Movies You May Have Missed: The Proposition

Because beautifully bleak, revenge-driven Westerns didn’t end with Sergio Leone.

Rook’s list of the top ten most anticipated films of the year got me thinking about The Road. Directed by John Hillcoat, starring Viggo Mortensen and Guy Pearce, and based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy–I know, right?–The Road was originally slated for release in November 2008. After some test screenings, the release was postponed, and at the moment, the film is still officially listed as ‘coming soon.’ So, is it coming out? Ever? And what am I to do until it does?

I’ve been waiting for this since 2005, when I saw The Proposition for the first time. The Proposition wasn’t Hillcoat’s first movie. It wasn’t even his first movie written by music legend Nick Cave. But it was my first Hillcoat movie. And it is searingly good. (I would also argue that it’s a film without which another great McCarthy adaptation, No Country For Old Men, would never have been made.)

The story of The Proposition centres, not altogether surprisingly, around a proposition. In lawless nineteenth-century Australia, the head of the local constabulary offers condemned criminal Charlie Burns a trade: a pardon for Burns and his younger brother Mike in exchange for a third brother’s head on a plate.

It’s a pickle.

If you’ve ever listened to a Nick Cave record, you’ve probably figured out that there aren’t really going to be any winners here. But the difficulty goes far beyond Charlie’s decision, or his Hamlet-esque indecisiveness. The film raises myriad impossible questions about family, nationhood, civilization, mythologies, culpability. (It’s no coincidence that the Burns brothers are, like Australian folk hero Ned Kelly, Irish immigrant outlaws, that Captain Stanley is as British as a bulldog, and that the film opens with a montage of historical photos of indigenous Australians.)

The film grips the notion of origin in its teeth. What does blood mean? What is guilt, and when is it assignable? Who ‘civilizes,’ and how? What happens when old national identities are dropped into a new, hostile environment (to say nothing of the nations of aboriginal people already in it, referred to as “rebel blacks” if they refuse to submit to colonial rule)? The film is neither political nor idealized, so the aboriginal characters are as ambiguous as everyone else. Yet when Tobey, the Stanleys’ servant, decides to return to the outback, he leaves behind the trappings of British civility–his shoes and his handkerchief. And what do we make of Arthur Burns’s young sidekick, Samuel Stoat, crooning an Irish folk song while committing rape?

Each of the principle characters has to contend with such questions in one way or another. The youngest of the Burns brothers, Mikey, opens the film screaming in terror and bewilderment. Charlie (Guy Pearce), his protector, says little, but only because there is nothing he can say, faced with the choice of killing his guilty brother or letting his innocent brother die. He is fierce but answerless. Arthur (Danny Huston), as compelling as he is disturbed/disturbing, lives like a ghost outside of the law. He’s the archetypal big brother–wise, protective, affectionate, bossy. That he is also demented would only make him more endearing if we didn’t have to witness his crimes.

Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone), engineer of the story’s brutal catalyst, is despicable and pitiable in equal measure. His efforts to wrench civilization down on his town are bound to fail–his own authority shows the cracks of his effort–and yet his moments with his wife, Martha, are tender and sympathetic. Martha (Emily Watson), though not willfully ignorant, lives in a tiny bubble of propriety. She is closely guarded by her husband–to her own undoing–but nothing can stop the juggernaut of what Stanley has set into motion. As demonstrated by Jellon Lamb, a psychotic bounty hunter (played by John Hurt, looking risen from the dead), the boundary between law and lawlessness has all but disappeared, if it was ever there at all.

The Proposition

The Proposition

Cave’s screenplay gets under your skin and then starts scratching on your bones. Visually, you are assaulted by the light, the dryness, the vast expanses of sky and land and dust–I remember squinting in the theatre. The score, by Cave and Warren Ellis, is startlingly nationless and contemporary in this specifically identity- and history-related story. Hillcoat never misses a step or pushes a moment. And his cast is an assembly of the most interesting actors working today. The film is grim, taut, and as tough as the skin on Jellon Lamb’s madly grinning face.

Note for aficionados: Check out the deleted scenes on the DVD, which include a character cut from the final version of the film who would have changed the dynamic significantly. With the benefit of seeing the finished version first, you can see that the filmmakers made the right choice. But like Charlie’s, it must have been an agonizing decision.

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