Eugene Weekly : Movie Review : 06.15.06

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Capacity for Cruelty

Struggles in a brutal landscape

By Molly Templeton

THE PROPOSITION: Written by Nick Cave. Directed by John Hillcoat. Cinematography, Benoit Delhomme. Music, Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. Starring Guy Pearce, Emily Watson, Ray Winstone, Danny Huston, John Hurt, David Wenham and Richard Wilson. First Look Pictures, 2006. R. 104 minutes.

Guy Pearce as Charlie Burns in The Proposition.

More than once, in the course of writer Nick Cave and director John Hillcoat's devastating, effective Australian Western, The Proposition, Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone), says, "I will civilize this land." He says it to criminals and officers; he says it to himself. He stands against a tide of violence and fate on a dry, dusty, 19th century frontier on the other side of the world. What exactly he hopes to accomplish is uncertain, but one thing is clear: He's losing the fight.

After a jarring opening gunfight, Stanley faces two of the Burns brothers, the weeping young Mikey (Richard Wilson) and stoic Charlie (Guy Pearce, all sinew and strain). Along with elder brother Arthur (Danny Huston), the Burns boys are wanted for the horrible murder of the Hopkins family. Stanley, certain that Arthur was the incident's mastermind, offers Charlie a deal: Find and kill Arthur, and Charlie and Mikey will be pardoned. Charlie, his face unreadable, takes the offer, clearly grasping that if he doesn't, he's a dead man sooner rather than later.

The Proposition is Nick Cave's first movie as sole writer (he co-wrote Ghosts … of the Civil Dead, a 1988 film also directed by Hillcoat). Better known as a musician, Cave recently told Entertainment Weekly that writing the movie was "quicker" than working on a new album. '"It's a f---ing movie, it's not literature,'' he said. But Cave doesn't give himself or the film enough credit: The Proposition is the stuff of great novels, a dark tale of revenge, justice and family that touches on larger matters (the struggle for a country, the horrible treatment of Aborigines) while focusing chiefly on character — the kind of character that evolves in a hot, filthy, fly-ridden, violent time and place.

Winstone, frustration and determination writ across his haggard face, is a standout in the exceptional cast. Pearce, ferocious and quiet, is barely recognizable as the lost Leonard of Memento. Emily Watson as Martha Stanley is pale against the Australian sun, torn between supporting her husband and grieving for a murdered friend. Danny Huston's Arthur is deluded and philosophic, a mercurial, amoral man whose most atrocious acts, glimpsed only briefly, are stomach-churning.

But Arthur isn't alone in committing atrocities. The Proposition quietly asks us to consider whose actions are worse: those of a man who believes he's exacting revenge, or those of the authorities who sentence an untried young man to flogging and are mercilessly racist in their condemnation and murder of Australia's indigenous people? How much blame lies on the man who thought he was serving justice, whose proposition leads to a harrowing Christmas Day confrontation?

The violence in The Proposition is brutal enough to make the movie not for everyone, but it is never romanticized, never anything but horrific. Cave and Hillcoat's remarkable film explores the depths of human capacity for cruelty and considers how far loyalty — be it to family or country — might lift people up or drag them down. With an atmospheric, ominous score and Benoit Delhomme's spacious photography, The Proposition is dark, dirty and honest, difficult to watch but more difficult to forget.

The Proposition plays at Cinema World through Thursday, June 15 only.