When it comes to the brutal landscape of the Western movie, John Ford’s wide-open Mojave Desert has nothing on the Australian Outback. As shot by John Hillcoat, the frontier of 1880s Australia radiates heat into the chilled theater. Not just heat, but dust, and most disgustingly, flies. John Wayne didn’t have to deal with the flies. Thick hordes of black flies, swarming as a singular mass over any source of moisture in the arid bush, are everywhere; the characters don’t pay the slightest attention to them, even though they are forced to suck them down as they pant heavily under the sun. Instead, it is the lawlessness and disorder of the place that constantly preoccupies lawman Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone), who soon coins the motto of Hillcoat’s Australia: “What sort of fresh hell is this?”
Dirrrty: Guy Pearce (above) plays an Irish immigrant in “The Proposition,” a western epic set in the Australian outback of the 1880s. John Hurt and Danny Huston (below) co-star.
It is Captain Stanley’s singular plan to “civilize this place” that provides the main plot — and title — for “The Proposition.” After capturing two of three brothers wanted for the rape and murder of a family on the frontier, he makes a proposition to Charlie Burns (Guy Pearce), the older of the captured pair: Find and kill his brother Arthur Burns (Danny Huston), ringleader of the gang, in exchange for sparing the seemingly innocent youngest from the noose on Christmas Day. As Charlie searches the dangerous bush for Arthur’s hideout, Captain Stanley struggles to protect the imprisoned Burns brother from mob violence and corrupt lawmen, and protect his sheltered Victorian wife Martha (Emily Watson) from the realization that she lives in such a hell as the Australian frontier.
The film begins with a series of old black- and-white photos of the Outback: aboriginals, bushrangers, squatters and swagmen — set to the moody piano of Nick Cave and haunting violin of Warren Ellis — that play like a History Channel nostalgia trip. In an instant, the photos give way to whizzing bullets and a manic camera view of the inside of a shed. Light razors into the dark from cracks and bulletholes while voices outside shout the familiar “Oi! We’ve got you surrounded!” spiel. Soon, someone is gut shot, and a pair of whores are screaming for mercy just before someone else slumps over, gun half-drawn, most of his face left on the floor adjacent. This is the way of the Western — a quiet peace made tense by the threat of absolute violence at any moment.
This template makes “The Proposition” the perfect vehicle for both director Hillcoat and writer Nick Cave (both native Australians): Hillcoat is known for his award-winning music videos and Cave for his narrative piano ballads, often full of violent imagery and murderous desperation. The scenes of violence play as music videos — short, memorable and immaculately shot — but with the charmingly twisted mind of Cave providing the detailed, bloody narratives instead of his music. The problem (common to music video directors) is that the rest of the movie is oddly paced, often moving too slowly without building tension in the style of Western greats like Peckinpah and Leone.
The film is often distracted from its intended proposition, however, when it attempts to show the varieties of the Australian experience: not just the flies, but the evil, well-mannered colonial governors, the freshly used cat o’ nine tails soaked through with blood, the frightening aboriginals and the lawmen that massacre them — it’s all too much for Captain Stanley to civilize. Stanley’s proposition may be the reason the film continues along, but the slices of bushranger Australian life are easily the most interesting moments in the film.
It seems everything in Australia is a battle, and each one is touched upon, if only for a moment, whether it be the conflict between the empire and the colony, conflict between the blacks and whites, or between the different groups of whites (“What is an Irishman but a nigger turned inside out?” says British bounty hunter Jellon Lamb, played by an always scene-stealing John Hurt). There’s even the Conradesque battle between civilization and madness, played out by Huston’s magnetic Arthur, who recites British poetry and ruminates on the landscape before descending into the settlements to rape women and stomp them to death. And of course, the plot requires fratricide, a quest unthinkable in any land besides that of uncivilized Australia.
Though the acting is consistently brilliant, the godforsaken landscape steals the show throughout the length of the film. The outback is so real and so dangerous that it provides the perfect setting for the battles of humanity waged by each character. Just as the Western gets to the core of American manhood — being forced to do right in a hostile environment, no matter the cost — the interior of Australia ups the ante. Here, it’s hard enough to fight to survive, but in order to civilize such a hell, a man can’t simply stop at survival. It makes for a Western experience as raw and as real as the anything in the genre.
