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Must See Movie...

A different way of telling a story

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

The Proposition is one of the darkest movies I have ever seen. Set in the outback Australia, The Proposition stars Guy Pearce as Charlie Burns. A man who has been sent by the local law enforcement (Ray Winstone) to hunt down and kill his older brother Arthur (Danny Huston) in exchange for a pardon for both him and his younger brother Mickey. The conflict escalates from their.The movie benefits strongly from breathtaking cinematography and mesmerizing performances all around. In particular Guy Pearce, Ray Winstone, Danny Huston, and Emily Watson are just magnificent as the main characters of the film. John Hurt also turns in an unforgettable cameo as an aging bounty hunter. The movie has a couple narrative problems, and there are a handful of scenes that feel unnecessarily drawn out or just unnecessary all together. Overall however the story manages to be compelling throughout especially thanks to its three dimensional, complex characters. The Proposition is a relentlessly dark film. Filled with graphic violence and many scenes where characters are either in physical or emotional pain. But its a compelling enough watch to make it worth sitting through. At least for me.

When Sergio Leone took a Kurosawa script and a tiny budget in the 60s and made a pulpy, full-blooded Spaghetti Western and re-established a dying genre, he filmed in Spain. The idea was that the sparse scenery of the setting represented the American frontier as well as any location in the heartland could, and he was right. Viewing The Proposition makes me wonder how it took so long for another director to apply this idea to the Australian Outback. In this country we have clustered columns of civilisation along the greener coasts, and a great central desert where at any time you could be hundreds of kilometres from the nearest settlement. Gone are the sweeping, widescreen vistas of John Ford; in their place are smaller, flatter hills that function as their own miniature version of Monument Valley. These mounds of earth do little to hide the endless and desolate horizon - it is terra nullius, land that has yet to be claimed, and in the settler's mindset, tamed. It is in this late period of the nineteenth century that John Hillcoat has captured the 'god-forsaken hole' in all its grime and short- lived glory. The setting is an unnamed town on the edge of British settlement, a proxy for the Western frontier; it could be anywhere in the outback because the camera shows no pathways leading in or out, only endless plains. The shots of the desert are awash with a dirt- red and yellow that signify the absence of life flourishing. Some of them remind me of the same locations captured in Roeg's Walkabout, which was abuzz with the hypnotic cacophony of the bush. This film is quieter. The residents speak very little, as if the outback has sapped their strength and conviction to do more than necessary to survive, and they have blended into the scenery and retreated into shade like a tiny horned lizard to find some solace from the sweltering sun. There is exhaustion etched into their faces. They know that they live in the origins of a convict colony, and a mere step backwards could send them all back to that state. So they pursue justice in the brief periods where it pops up as a viable pathway. Captain Stanley and his wife have the noblest of these intentions, and slowly we witness as they wither in the sun like all the other characters have done so in the past. Martha, played by a trembling Emily Watson, marks a small spot in the dirt and attempts to recreate what she wished was their home with a wilting rose garden and Victorian dress. When the pair have a lavish dinner towards the end of the film, they shut all the windows and doors and submerge themselves into that white picket fence dream, with less than successful results. Delhomme returns several times to the iconic Searchers-type shot of the camera placed in the darkened interiors of the homestead, peering out at the sun-beat exterior. At times, it seems to be almost trying to retreat and hide, to no avail. Opposing them are the recurring shots where the scene drifts along the outback, combining with a mournful fiddle and whispers of a poem doting on what it sees: the earth dry as a bone, the sun melting the ground, the river that refuses to run.These seem to align along with the perspective of the Burns brothers, who drip with sweat and have beards that rival the scraggly desert bushes themselves, but are the least bothered by the heat. Indeed they relish it, and the shots where they sit and witness the sunset are by far the most picturesque of them all. Hillcoat, with these two alternate depictions of the setting, wants to create conflict that reflects the Burns' renegade lifestyle and which makes them shimmer vibrantly within the weary outback, but he isn't overt enough to sell this idea. The wide sunset shots, framing Uluru under the yellow orb, border on parody instead of being subversive, and become merely pretty pictures (the moments of calm before a thunderstorm are also similarly gorgeous). Pearce and Huston both look the part, but the whispers of their foul deeds overshadow their actual actions, so we have little to refer to when it comes to judging them (and therefore, it dilutes Charlie's final decision). This may be an unintentional effect of the nature of these stories, where legend often subsumes reality, and an ordinary criminal figure becomes a demon. This is one of the reasons that film keeps returning to Wyatt Earp.Instead I come to Stanley as the more interesting character. He alone seems to know the price of descending back into savagery, and although his methods might be akin to making a deal with the devil, they have a logic that the other methods do not. The culmination of these come when Mikey is dragged out to be given a hundred lashes, or what is basically a death sentence, and Stanley, so rough and ragged that he might be mistaken for a fourth Burns brother himself, takes the side of the criminal over mob justice. The grisly closeup of the whip's tassels needing to be wringed out because of the blood, and the slowly dispersing and once defiant crowd are the final justification for his argument, but a little too late. Ray Winstone intrigues us because he plays a familiar character, the gruff 'order around here' policeman, but reveals a personal conviction underneath the cracks. We sense that he plays this part because no one else can do it, and therefore has to make extreme concessions in order to pave the way for progress. And yet when Martha asks him to imagine that it was her that had been raped and murdered, he wilts like all the others around him, because he too has something that he cares about and would momentarily, in the heat of emotion, compromise his values for.

A good ten years have passed since last I saw "The Proposition", and it'll probably be another ten before I watch this again. But knowing how cold and evil this movie is does help you enjoy the more subtle things like character and story. There are some nice performances here (John Hurt was a highlight) and I found myself wishing the story would move away from Guy Pearce and back to Ray Winstone. The story itself is as Western as they come: retribution, justice, misanthropic family. Fairly simplistic. It's not a bad movie, and it does plunge you into the brutal Australian outback where society lives on the raggedy edge.But it is, first and foremost, a nasty affair. The violence runs grisly, and when the blood isn't flying, the sound design picks up the slack and your imagination does the rest.Not my thing.5/10

I think the main downfall of this movie is that the entire plot is revealed in the first five minutes of it (as well as the plot synopsis). John Hillcoat also directed "Lawless" which was a pretty good movie but since it was based on real events it doesn't matter if it was predictable. This wasn't allowed the same graces. Danny Huston's voice was really the only reason I kept watching it. Guy Pierce was decent, Richard Wilson was awful snivelly, and Ray Winstone was not very threatening, though I did appreciate him standing up for Mike. The other main villain (whose character name I don't remember) was too demented and I really felt sorry for him rather than disliking him. This didn't bring anything to the "aus-western" genre except for the whole "which brother is more important" thing.I think the best way for this to be better would be to reveal the proposition at the very end instead of right away. It wouldn't be a twist ending as much as something worth waiting for.