THE PROPOSITION B+
Australia Great Britain (104 mi) 2005 ‘Scope d: John Hillcoat
A good and evil revenge drama written and scored by Nick Cave, drearily set in a town on the border of the wide open spaces of the Australian Outback, as desolate and godforsaken a place as has ever graced the screen, where any semblance of “civilization” is as out of place as any notion of justice. Yet those are the overriding themes in this concisely paired down western where an outlaw gang has been terrorizing the locals, where humans are like ants on the landscape, barely scratching the surface from the overall looks of things, yet leaving behind a bloody trail of the savagely brutal evidence of their handiwork, which includes murder and rape. The story is largely seen through two sets of eyes, Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone), the bullying British sheriff wearing an Army uniform brought in to establish the law, boasting “I will civilize this country,” and Charlie Burns (Guy Pearce), part of the ruthless Burns gang, captured early on by Stanley along with his baby brother Mikey (Richard Wilson). Stanley makes him a proposition to set him free in order to kill his older brother, the sadistically psychotic madman Arthur Burns (Danny Huston), the most violently uncontrollable of the brothers, holed up in the most barren, vacuous landscape that the police and even the Aboriginals refuse to go there. Carry out this act and his baby brother’s life will be spared, otherwise Mikey will be hanged in one week’s time on Christmas Day. What follows are beautifully structured parallel stories of the two men, both of whom spend their time in the company of corrupt, disgruntled and despicable men, as the soldiers are drunken lowlifes who would just as soon beat the prisoner to death as see him live another day, while the Burns brothers themselves are no picnic, depraved savages who seem to kill for sport.
What’s evident in nearly every shot is the scorching heat, where dirt and dust define the land, where barely anything survives in this hostile isolation, where the land itself couldn’t be more uninviting, yet the beauty of the landscape is magnificently shot by cinematographer Benoît Delhomme, much of which resembles the poetic look of a Terrence Malick film, capturing the serenity of a series of sunsets that torch the earth in bright, brazen colors. But the people couldn’t be more dark and gloomy, having nothing that amounts to satisfaction in their perpetually deprived lives. In a lustrous performance, Emma Watson plays Captain Stanley’s exaggeratedly well mannered wife, whose gorgeous presence is like a mirage on the landscape, where the constantly under siege Stanley continually has to return her safely back home to the white picket fence and the pristine red rose bushes in order to prevent her from seeing the brutally dirty business involved in tracking down outlaws. Winstone has spent so much of his career playing guys on the wrong side of the law, that when he plays this robust sheriff with a raw edge, he’s like the last bastion of moral order, as the townspeople can’t wait until Christmas and want to rip the prisoner apart, despite the fact he’s just a kid, and the real danger remains at large. When the local prosecutor gets wind of the deal Stanley made with the outlaws, he undermines his authority and orders Mikey to receive a public flogging of 100 lashes, perhaps the turning point of the film, as Stanley is reduced to a powerless bystander while the savagely grotesque scene shows justice when administered as revenge to be as wickedly evil as the crime itself, where even the horrified onlookers turn away witnessing this kid completely slumped over already near dead, reduced to a bloody mess before they even get halfway done.
As Charlie crosses the expanse of the perpetually empty landscape contemplating what he has to do with his brother, we have seen this part of the story before visualized in Coppola’s APOCALYPSE NOW (1979), where a U.S. Captain (Martin Sheen) is ordered to take out a deranged renegade American commander (Marlon Brando) who has portrayed himself as a God to the natives. Similarly, Arthur Burns is living in an abandoned cave somewhere with another younger white Samuel (Tom Budge), who sings a lovely Irish song, along with an Aboriginal sidekick Two-Bob (Tom E. Lewis) and Queenie (Leah Purcell), living among the Aboriginal people, hunting and living off the land as they do, but also making murderous raids into the white town. Charlie’s visit is a bit unsettling, as he arrives without Mikey, where the weight of his visit is upon his shoulders. Hillcoat does an excellent job shifting between the two stories, editing the material together, and sustaining the psychological tension, where there’s some question as to whether Captain Stanley or Charlie Burns is the lead, as both carry moral dilemmas on their backs, like bullseyes, but only Stanley is targeted and actually emasculated by his superior. Charlie is the great unknown, as he’s already an unlawful outsider, so for him to administer justice does not typically meet Western society’s needs. It’s unusual for him to have been assigned the task, which adds plenty of weight to his role, played with a near wordless complexity that Pearce relishes. His outsider status confirms the difficulty in assigning society’s moral responsibility, like Charles Bronson’s vigilante justice in DEATH WISH (1974 – 94), or John Wayne’s years long search for his niece in THE SEARCHERS (1956), which sometimes resemble the lawless acts the society condemns, but silently accepts during particularly harsh and brutal times, where in crossing the line the film actually plunges into the horror genre to make that point.
