I Will Civilize This Land

Movie Review: The Proposition

I already knew Nick Cave was super cool. Maybe not the King of Cool but easily the Grand Admiral or something. Not only has he enjoyed large-scale musical success even while indulging his less mainstream predilections, but he's also been featured in wicked movies, is a goddamn novelist, is from Australia, and looks sexy even if he's never what I would call "traditionally handsome." Oh and then, it turns out, he wrote a 2005 film called The Proposition, which is nothing if not a cool movie.

The Proposition is a western movie that takes place in Australia. The outlaw Burns brothers are captured by lawman Captain Stanley, who keeps the younger Mikey and sends the older Charlie to kill their eldest brother and depraved family patriarch Arthur or Mikey is to die. The film focuses equally on Guy Pearce as Charlie and Ray Winstone as Stanley, and benefits on excellent actors not only for these two leads but the surprisingly extensive supporting cast as well.

The Proposition is one of what I'd call a modern tradition of westerns, with less focus on grandiose machismo and more on the realism of the brutality of that time, and its effect on those who lived through it. Setting it in Australia at a time when much of the country was still essentially lawless gives it a particular fixation on the line between civilization and the wild, and in an extension of that, the separation of what makes us people as opposed to animals. Captain Stanley tries to bring order to an untamed land, and in his home we see an island of Imperial nicety amidst a harsh and feral desert. His tactics are gruesome, and yet he's one of the more noble characters in the film - which is saying something. Even Emily Watson as his wife Martha, struggling to remain composed, gives into her dark animal impulses when it comes down to it. Charlie, meanwhile, knows the wild well and has lived amongst people who feel no need to be any better than animals, killing indiscriminately as it suits them, and seeks to remove himself to something better. Unfortunately for Charlie, the film proposes that civilization isn't all it's cracked up to be.

It's always hot. There are flies everywhere and in multitudes. The inhabitants in this world almost seem to begrudge their being in it. For a film made by two Australians, it is starkly unsentimental about Australia, indifferent to the cruelty of its history. It easily stands its ground amidst all the other high profile westerns that came out in the past few years.