THE PROPOSITION
Director: John Hillcoat Stars: Guy Pearce, Ray Winstone, Emily Watson, Danny Huston, John Hurt, Tom Budge, David Wenham
Reviewed by PETER MALONE
A striking film with the power to disturb.
Music video director, John Hillcoat, has made only three films, the 1988 grim prison drama, Ghosts Of The Civil Dead and the 1996 New Guinea melodrama, To Have And To Hold. With each of them he has collaborated with musician Nick Cave. Cave has written the screenplay for The Proposition as well as its score and poetic lyrics.
On the one hand, the makers had the traditions of the American Western in view, the films of Sam Peckinpah as well as the Italian films of Sergio Leone. On the other hand, they were making a film about outback Australia in the 1880s, a frontier certainly with similarities with the west but with its own life and problems. Far north western Queensland was still part of the then burgeoning British Empire no matter how different the desert, the rocks and the ranges were from the mother country. British authorities were brought in to keep law and order, not an easy thing with alienated Irish families (think also Ned Kelly in Victoria who was executed in 1880) taking up brutal crime as well as a generally humiliating racist attitude towards the aborigines, especially when they were considered to have ‘rebelled’.
All this is present in The Proposition.
The photography of the landscapes and the skyscapes create a distinctive Australian atmosphere. The sometimes iconic close-up contemplation of faces of both officers of the law and the outlaws suggests a mythical tone for the film. The range of speeches about empire, about Darwin’s Origin Of The Species as applied to aborigines (in a powerful speech by bounty hunter John Hurt who appears so effectively in only two sequences), about justice and imprisonment, about wealth and poverty offer a great deal of food for thought in what is a very physical and visceral film. This latter is very true of the flogging sequence where the people want vengeance and become disgusted. (Hillcoat has forty lashes while intercutting reactions and a song voiceover making its greater reticence as disturbing as The Passion Of The Christ).
Ray Winstone gives his most sympathetic performance as a hard man with a soft side, trying to maintain law and order at the behest of the foppish, wealthy and merciless landowner (David Wenham). Emily Watson impresses as Winstone’s wife, trying to maintain some English gentility, afraid of the brutality and of her own spirit of vengeance. Hillcoat directs a moving scene where she describes a disturbing dream by focusing on the movements and gestures of her hands.
Guy Pearce, gaunt as ever, is the outlaw brother who wants to save his simpleton brother from hanging by going after his older brother, the leader of the crimes of robbery and rape (Danny Huston).
The Proposition is something of a revisionist look at the colonies in the 1880s, especially Queensland. On the frontier life was not easy. One had to be rugged and tough to pioneer settlement and survive. The violence was brutal, towards women, towards the aborigines some of whom were troopers, some of whom rode with the gangs and others were servants – one of the latter, still in his buttoned up attire, wishes his masters a merry Christmas as he removes his boots and walks out of the gate barefoot back into his land.