The Proposition Kicks Up Dust and Guts

The Proposition is a bloody, dirty movie that is determined, above all else, to prove just how bloody and dirty it can be. Offering an artfully composed but determinedly grueling and despairing look at pre-modern frontier life (this time in the late 19^th century Australian outback), it succeeds in proving its grisly bona fides—perhaps too well.

There comes a point when a film’s devotion to the cruel terrors of life can make it simple unpleasant to watch, and if The Proposition doesn’t cross that line, it certainly skirts it. It is, essentially, two stories in one: On one hand, we see follow Charlie Burns (Guy Pearce), the middle child in a three brother outlaw gang, who has been told to kill his brutal older brother or watch his frail younger sibling hang. Interspersed with this, we see Police Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone) attempt to coral his surly men while attempting to shield his delicate wife (Emily Watson) from their rugged society’s rampant miseries. This back and forth narrative reflects the dual nature of the film’s central motif: the split between civility and barbarism.

The film presents these two ends of the societal spectrum as complete, a wholly bifurcated view of existence, in which there are only the affects of civility and the base instincts of chaos. Director John Hillcoat plays with these two disparate elements in a number of interesting ways, filming the untamed wilds of the outback with real elegance while focusing on the dirtier, grittier aspects of organized society. The final sequence, in which a murderous gang tears down the door to Stanley’s house during a formal Christmas dinner, suggests that, even in the most pointedly civil surroundings, the bloodthirsty violence and unkempt rage of man’s basest instincts is always ready to explode onto the scene.

But Hillcoat and screenwriter Nick Cave don’t seem to know exactly what to do with their polarized view of existence, and they’re often distracted by showing the hardness and casual misery of frontier life. So instead of going somewhere with their idea, they simply recycle it into new and ever more twisted forms. It’s an interesting concept, and much of the pciture is beautifully filmed, but in the end, it has no reason to exist other than to partake, repeatedly, in the long, grueling slog of living. The ragged violence of both the desert and its inhabitants isn’t just hard on the film's characters—it’s hard on its viewers as well.