Film Illiterate, wherein the proprietor records movies seen, and sporadic progress through assorted lists of the "best". Originally started after regretfully renting something forgettable for the third time. I've forgotten what, but never again! A tedious endeavour since 2005. Hello. 🙂
Superb, graphically violent Australian "Western". It's not the most appropriate label, because the the stories of Australia's frontier days are thematically very different from traditional, which is to say American, Westerns. We don't have brave sheriffs fighting off bandits; we have Ned Kelly, bushranger, sticking it to the Colonial authorities.
Just as modern Westerns have tended to cast aside the heroic John Wayne tropes in favour of anti-heroes, moral equivocation and unromantic realism -- Deadwood in particular paints a gruesome picture of violence and mud -- The Proposition provides an anti-bushranger to match their anti-cowboys.
Which is to say, I suppose, that the film's characters aren't very pleasant people. It's hard to romanticize Charlie Burns (Guy Pearce), the bushranger given nine days to kill his older brother Arthur (Danny Huston), a psychopathic rapist living half-crazy in the wilderness. It's hard to romanticize Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone), the lawman who will execute Charlie's younger and comparatively innocent brother, Mike (Richard Wilson), if he doesn't bring back Arthur's head in time. Arthur is just a monster.
The outback has never looked harsher and less forgiving, but it's beautifully shot. The violence is so graphic and the story compelling; the cast give creditable performances, and it's a great script from Nick Cave.
Bushranger films haven't had that much popularity here, no doubt in part because they were illegal during much of Australia's film boom. It's odd to start a new canon of Australian Westerns with a film about the end of the frontier -- its tagline is "This Land Will Be Civilized" -- but The Proposition is so good that I can't help but hope for more like it.