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(Safe to read the first 3 paragraphs!)
There was no Australian cinema before the 1970s, just
a few cheap flicks for local consumption and movies made
by foreign filmmakers, invariably bringing their own stars
with them. Then came 'the last new wave' (the title of
David Stratton's 1980 book on Australian cinema), though
there was to be another New Wave in the 1980s with the
emergence of a lively cinema in New Zealand. What happened
in Australia was less a renaissance than a naissance,
and the best of the films were about the birth of a national
consciousness, the search for an Australian identity,
and transactions the newcomers had with this strange land
and the culture of its Aboriginal inhabitants. Many of
the best were set in the late nineteenth century or the
early twentieth century: one thinks particularly of Peter
Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock, Fred Schepisi's The Chant
of Jimmy Blacksmith and Bruce Beresford's The Getting
of Wisdom.
Nowadays the chief creators of the Australian cinema work
in Hollywood, and their successors' films are more concerned
with suburban life than with great national issues. Directed
by John Hillcoat and scripted by the musician Nick Cave,
The Proposition takes us back to the glory days - and
a major link to that period resides in the presence in
a minor role of David Gulpilil, the country's most famous
Aboriginal actor who appeared in a string of Australian
classics.
Set in the 1880s in the Queensland outback, it's stylistically
influenced by the westerns of Sergio Leone, Sam Peckinpah
and Monte Hellman. But the striking images of isolated
buildings, strange rock formations, heat-shimmering desert
and curious flora recorded by the French cinematographer
Benoît Delhomme evoke the Australian painters Tom
Roberts, George Russell Drysdale and Sidney Nolan rather
than Frederic Remington and the chroniclers of the American
west. The film begins with a ferocious shoot-out, seen
largely from the point of view of some Irish bushrangers
and their women besieged by police in a cabin, with shafts
of lights coming from the bullet holes that turn the building
into a wooden colander.
When the battle ends with three outlaws taken prisoner,
the English policeman, Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone),
makes an offer to one of them, Charlie Burns (Guy Pearce).
Go out into the desert and kill your elder brother Arthur
(Danny Huston), or your younger brother, the 14-year-old
Mikey, will be hanged on Christmas Day, a mere nine days
hence. This is the stark proposition of the title, and
the ways in which it is respected or reneged upon defines
the film's action.
There is no formal exposition in the film. We learn from
various hints that the Burns gang is dominated by the
eloquent psychopathic Arthur, that their final outrage
was an attack on an isolated homestead and involved rape
and murder. Otherwise we are left to gather from their
appearances who the people are and what they stand for.
Captain Stanley is a decent enough cop, ruthless but a
man of his word, who has apparently come to Australia
to better himself. He's determined to protect his genteel
wife, Martha (Emily Watson), from the horrors of this
world. Evidently a cut above her husband, she's trying
to recreate England in this wilderness, with her fancy
tea service, an imported Christmas tree, and cotton wool
to resemble snow. She lies on her bed, a mail-order catalogue
resting on her chest. More active in this direction is
Eden Fletcher (David Wenham), an upper-class English landowner
who views with contempt all those around him, whether
they be the unkempt European settlers in the half-built
town of Banyon, the bushrangers or the Aboriginals he
wishes to exterminate. 'I will civilise this land,' he
declares. Disregarding the deal made by Stanley, whom
he controls, he arranges a lethal whipping of the jailed
Mikey. This whipping
scene has a casual horror about it. The spectators watch
the grisly spectacle, Guy Pearce (Charlie Burns) oblivious
to the swarms of flies that gather on their backs, and
the lash ends up as if dipped in a bucket of blood.
Out in the desert, the Burns brothers, wild colonial boys
- presumably transported Irish convicts or descendants
of convicts - seem at one with the land. Its beauty and
implacability evidently appeal to their nature. Arthur,
a charismatic madman in the manner of the outlaws of the
American frontier, waxes poetic as he watches the sun
set each night over the desert; to him it's a premonition
of death, the ultimate Celtic Twilight. The Burns brothers
respect the Aboriginals and do not wish to tame the land.
But on his journey to kill his brother, Charlie is nearly
killed by aggressive Aborigines. This happens after a
strange, violent encounter with a boozy, gentlemanly expatriate
adventurer (John Hurt, left, reprising his drunken cynic
from Heaven's Gate).
The Proposition is both a realistic action movie and a
forceful fable about the birth of a nation. The performances
are impressive, though perhaps David Wenham verges on
caricature. It might be, however, that Victorian Englishmen
did become caricatures in such colonial situations. You
can certainly speak of this film in the same breath as
such recent American westerns as Unforgiven, Dances With
Wolves and Open Range.
It isn't going to be to everyone's taste; I found myself
wishing I could have brought a sofa into the cinema to
hide behind. But it really is a very stylish, arresting
piece of movie-making, throbbing with heat and fear and
violence and with fiercely uncompromising lead performances
from Guy Pearce and Danny Huston, whose faces are baked,
impassive masks, eloquent of nothing but despair.
With Charlie and Mikey under the control of Stanley -
a hard-faced empire-builder and lawman - Arthur's prestige
only mounts. He has become an almost legendary figure,
hiding out in the mountains, where he is rumoured to change
his form and become a black dog. So Stanley makes Charlie
a proposition that is to lead to catastrophe: a fatally
ambiguous proposition that reveals Stanley to be either
a sadistic copper, eager to humiliate and break the brothers
in spirit, or an enlightened, even liberal, policeman
whose imaginative gamble is to earn him the contempt of
his junior officers.
We see the gentler, uxorious side of Stanley (Ray Winstone)
through the eyes of his wife (Emily Watson, left), who,
in the classic western manner, is shown walking briskly
through the dusty streets of the pioneer town, with a
wicker shopping basket over her arm, exchanging civilities
with the townsfolk. It is under her gaze that we see Stanley
tending to his English-suburban rose garden in the roasting
earth, and offering to carve the Sunday joint - they are
like a couple of Australian Pooters.
Benoît Delhomme's camerawork extracts every last
drop of harsh flavour from the cracked landscape, and
the movie itself has the quality of a bad dream. Danny
Huston has a strong and unsettling presence as the vicious,
audacious Arthur, driven by sociopathic desire to hurt,
but given also to poetic flights of fancy, and to sentimental
yet menacing speeches on the importance of family loyalty.
John Hurt has an excellent cameo as an English adventurer
who hopes to collect the bounty on these notorious scofflaws.
What is unsettling about The Proposition is that there
is none of the customary reverence for Aborigines that
is often compulsory for Australian films. Admittedly,
it has a quaint, even preposterous, warning over the opening
credits that members of some tribes will find the film's
images of dead people offensive - but the Aborigines'
sensibilities get blasted along with everyone else's.
It is a very disturbing moment when an Aboriginal hunting
spear appears out of nowhere in the mountains and runs
a European's body right through, in an eerie, unmoving
silence. But so far from paying awed respect for the Aborigine's
superior hunting skills on his own turf, far from allowing
him to vanish unmolested into the landscape, the film
delivers an instant and shocking response to this hunter
from the barrel of a white criminal's shotgun. It is a
taboo moment, and a nihilistic anger governs the way everyone
and everything is treated in this fiercely pessimistic
film.
It is a walk on the dark side, no question about it, but
the conviction and flair with which these sulphurous images
are presented makes The Proposition a riveting experience,
and the performances from Pearce and Huston (right) have
star quality
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