The Proposition Release Date: May 5, 2006 Starring: Guy Pearce, Ray Winstone, Danny Houston, Richard Wilson Directed by: John Hillcoat
PREMIERE.COM'S MOVIE REVIEW (posted 5/5/06)
John Hillcoat’s Aussie western, The Proposition, begins in a hail of bullets and ends with one of the main characters bleeding to death from a gunshot wound to the gut. In between, there’s a vicious whipping, several decapitations and impalement via a spear. It’s bloody, brutal stuff and the effects and makeup teams deserve plenty of praise for creating such realistic-looking gore on a tight budget. The rest of the technical crew also delivers top-notch work, from Benoit Delhomme’s beautiful cinematography to the production designers’ evocative recreation of a small rural Australian town circa the late 19th century. Special mention must also go to the fly wranglers, who no doubt had the hardest job on the film. Virtually every scene features dozens of flies buzzing around the frame and landing on the characters’ clothes, faces and hair. Everything (and everyone) is so filthy, viewers may feel the need to make a beeline for the shower as soon as they exit the theater.
Too bad the crew’s efforts are in service of such a sketchy movie. The script was written by noted rock musician Nick Cave, who obviously studied Unforgiven and the films of Sam Peckinpah very closely before sitting down to write his own revisionist western. Our hero—or anti-hero to be precise—is Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone), a British lawman who has been brought to Australia to curb the lawlessness plaguing the Outback. One of the main causes of that lawlessness is the Burns gang, a band of outlaws led by psycho killer Arthur Burns (Danny Houston). In the opening shootout, Stanley captures Arthur’s brother and former accomplice Charlie (Guy Pearce) and presents him with the titular proposition: find and kill his older sibling and he’ll be allowed to go free. Fail and his little brother Mikey (Richard Wilson) will be hanged on Christmas Day. The townspeople are none too happy when they hear that their supposed protector let a known killer go free, but Stanley is convinced that Charlie will do the right thing. As it turns out though, Charlie hasn’t decided where his loyalties ultimately lie…
With its bleak worldview and brutal violence, The Proposition is, without question, a visceral experience, but it’s also a curiously empty one. Cave’s screenplay deliberately leaves a lot of things unsaid, counting on the actors and the director to fill in the blanks. And while Winstone turns in a sharply etched performance, his co-stars drift through the movie without ever connecting with their characters. The perpetually miscast Houston looks particularly lost here, while Pearce is uncharacteristically stiff. Then there’s John Hurt, who contributes a truly embarrassing cameo as a drunken bounty hunter. Cave and Hillcoat do have weighty themes on their minds—the tug of war between civilization’s rules and the freedom of the frontier, the thin line separating the good guys from the bad—but these ideas are clumsily explored at best. The Proposition can be appreciated as a strong technical exercise, but it fails to resonate on any deeper level. —Ethan Alter
