Cruel men in a pitiless terrain
There is a short but
high-quality list of Australian Westerns or, if you prefer, Australian takes on
the Western. Certainly the harsh desert locations, conflict with the indigenous
population, fight for survival, hardship, outlaws and violence are all features
of both US and Australian history. There is also a list, growing longer, of quality
Australian films that deal with the country’s origins and the search for an
identity, dwelling in particular on the nineteenth or early twentieth century –
films like Picnic at Hanging Rock or The Getting of Wisdom. The Proposition belongs on both lists.
This movie, which
intersperses extreme violence with lyrical longing, is written by Nick Cave,
narrative songwriter extraordinaire. I don’t know if Mr. Cave had read Cormac
McCarthy’s Blood Meridian but I
suspect that he might have. The
Proposition has a similar arid tone of casual violence from cruel men in a
pitiless terrain.
The acting is excellent,
especially of Ray Winstone as an English police captain out to civilize this
barbarous land, whose character develops from ruthless brutishness to sensitive
decency. Equally good is Danny Huston (son of John, grandson of Walter) who
plays the high-talking psychopath with charm and poetry in his soul, bushranger
Arthur Burns. Roger Ebert draws a parallel between Burns and the Judge in Blood Meridian.
This gun-pointing seems a popular pose
(By the way, Danny Huston
also tells a great story on the making-of DVD. He says his father, on the set
of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, breathlessly said to Humphrey Bogart, “I think we’re making
something special here.” Bogie replied, “Oh, shut up, John. It’s just a
Western.”)
The eponymous proposition is
pitiless in itself. The police will hang Charlie Burns’s young brother Mikey unless
Charlie finds and kills the eldest one, Arthur.
Very popular
The photography is by
Frenchman Benoît Delhomme. It’s stunningly good. It’s the first of his work
I’ve seen. While the base color of a classic American Western is red or orange,
and that of an Italian-Spanish Western an olive gray, the dominant tone of this
Australian one is yellow. It is weird to see Charlie Burns (Guy Pearce, the cop
Exley from LA Confidential) riding,
looking very like Clint, past a real butte in what looks like a lemon Arizona.
Yellow Arizona
As with so many films these
days, the costumes, set design, make-up and props are superb. The overall
impression is of dirt, heat and coarseness. Emily Watson plays the police captain’s
bourgeoise wife, serving tea from porcelain, growing red roses in a garden marooned
in the desert and trying desperately to maintain decorum in a frankly barbaric
land.
John Hurt is in it, as a
bounty hunter, and is actually quite good for once. Of course he overacts but
he manages a morbidly interesting character. He was in five Westerns and poor
in all of them, especially in Wild Bill and Heaven’s Gate. This movie was about his
best Western.
Hurt not awful
There’s a great very short
scene where a red stage coach crosses the screen and you suddenly realize it
has ‘Royal Mail’ rather then ‘Wells, Fargo’, written on it, and it is pulled by
four camels. The opening shot is of the Burns boys holed up in a tin shack
being shot at and the bullets ripping through letting sunlight pour in, like
some nineteenth century Leung Chi Wo. It’s a quotation, of course, but a good
one.
Light through bullet holes
“All the characters in the
film are victims,” says Huston. Actually, perhaps they are all victims save
one, the odious town boss Eden Fletcher (David Wenham) who is the only one to
get off scot free.
The music is by Nick Cave,
obviously, with Warren Ellis, and is very good. Two years later the pair did
the music for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.
This is a first class Western, lyrical, poetic, violent, thought-provoking,
with interesting characters with whom we sympathize (well, most of them). It is a murder ballad. It
is a tale of brotherly love.
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