By Blake Howard
A trap was laid for two of three infamous bushranger brothers, Mike Burns (Richard Wilson) and Charlie Burns (Guy Pearce). The crew of Irish outlaws and their Chinese prostitute companions are riddled with bullets in their tin shed barrel. As Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone) interrogates the men, his pale troopers dig a mass grave and wilt in the extreme sun. Their tracker, David Gulpilil’s Jacko, stands rigid and tall – cutting a stoic figure in the unbearable heat. The tracker and his counterparts articulate the contrast between indigenous people and colonials with their bodies. The indigenous tracker is calm in his belonging, the frenzy of activity in the ruddy troopers feels like a retreat into the very earth. The indigenous people are as at home in the landscape as the rocks, and the pink skinned colonials writhe until they’re in shelter. The Proposition is an uncompromising vision of the Australian frontier, where civilisation is built on a foundation of blood and servitude.
Nick Cave – yes, the lead singer of the eponymous Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – is the screenwriter. The dark prince of alternative rock crafts a profoundly simple yet elemental take on an unwinnable bargain. Captain Stanley (Winstone) provides Charlie (Pearce) with a choice; the life of his sweet brother Mike (Wilson) for the life of his abominable older brother Arthur (Danny Huston). Mike is introduced, sniveling and scarred shaking in the haze of gun fire. Charlie is an archetypal Irish bushranger, the chip on his shoulder is a deep trough from trans-continental English oppression. Huston plays the amoral madman Arthur with wolfish hunger and shamanic approach to intellect; a ruddy outback Rasputin.
Australian frontier tales of bushrangers have, according to Wikipedia, inherited the moniker of “Meat pie” Western. This nickname is infuriatingly stupid, but The Proposition is undoubtedly a Western. The great film critic Roger Ebert wrote about Sergio Leone’s The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, and perfectly enunciated the difference between the established U.S Western and the Italian ‘Spaghetti’ (another stupid nickname) Western.
“John Ford made Monument Valley the home turf of his Western characters, and he made great films there, but there is something new and strange about Leone’s menacing Spanish vistas. We haven’t seen these deserts before. John Wayne has never been here. Leone’s stories are a heightened dream in which everything is bigger, starker, more brutal, more dramatic, than life.”
The Proposition makes those settings look like Gilligan’s Island. John Hillcoat, Australian director of The Road, Lawless (also written by Cave) and Triple 9, composes the town of Banyon and its meager dwellings as little respite against the unfathomable daytime heat. Flies hover in clouds and blanket the dim and po-faced local population whenever they’re stationary. Northern Queensland, away from the glistening seaside locales, is a terrifying place. In the DVD commentary for the film, Hillcoat and team reveal that there were days in the desert where temperatures on the ground reached as high as 57 degrees. The on-sight medics reportedly feared for the cast’s safety, while the crew reported that some equipment began to melt. The Australian outback is a cruel furnace and your very survival is an affront to nature. John Wayne would be as home in the outback as Emily Watson’s upper class British housewife Martha Stanley.
The evenings glisten spectacularly, as the mostly inhospitable landscape allows an unimpeded view of the night sky. The Burns brothers, at different moments of the film, stare into the tapestry of stars and seem to communicate across space and time. The night sky is a comfort, a spirit and an inky black swaddle.
Captain Stanley (Winstone) desperately repeats that he will civilise this place. In 1880s colonial Australia, taming this wild land is an exercise in corruption. Stanley’s bargain with the Burns brothers is explicit. There’s a madness and an inevitability in his failure from the very beginning of the film. Showing photographs of indigenous people being assimilated into English society of the time is so offensively incongruous. His tactics are a desperate extermination of undesirables, as long as the deaths are out of earshot, so-to-speak, of this emerging civilisation. It’s a tenuous powder keg. What if Charlie unleashes Arthur upon the town of Banyon? What if Arthur finds out that it was his design? The Proposition kindly obliges the answers to these and more questions.
Running in tandem to this bargain is the use of trackers and indigenous scouts as bloodhounds for English troopers to seek and destroy their own people. This Faustian bargain though is par for the course in British colonial world building. Punishment for those who don’t cooperate with the British is swift and brutal. This white superiority outlook of the world is reinforced in the performance of John Hurt’s marvelous bounty hunter Jellon Lamb. His intellect is demonstrated with theatricality and yet he’s been driven to madness by the landscape. When he encounters Charlie (Pearce) for the first time, he is quick to establish the order; “we are white men,” and therefore we’re above these savages who somehow survive with ease in this hellish land. Charlie’s rogue instincts see through the sweet talking facade to the cretinous vulture. Hurt echoes Richard Harris’ English Bob in Unforgiven, and shares a similar fate.
The Australian outback in The Proposition is like nothing you’ve seen before. When the sun is out it feels like one side of a molten vice. The other side is the ochre earth that looks like it’s flecked with the blood of those ground into the very dust. On the surface it’s a tale of control, manipulation and morality. Hiding in plain sight is a powerful portrait of Australia, underscored by a haunting and authentic score from Cave and Warren Ellis. In the opening column of this series, I discussed that great Westerns reveal more about the decade they’re produced than the time that they’re set. The power of The Proposition is that it challenges foundational myths of Australian history in a bloody cinematic poem that reverberates not just for a decade but a century.
A Michael Mann fanatic all the time, Blake Howard is an Aussie film writer, editor and member of the Online Film Critics Society. Co-founder of the acclaimed Australian film website Graffiti with Punctuation, he offers articulate analysis across the gamut of cinema from blockbusters to indies galore.
A former co-host of That Movie Show 2UE, he’s also behind the top-rating film podcasts such as Pod Save Our Screen and The Debrief, a freelance contributor to outlets from Penthouse to ABC News 24, and a co-host of the weekly ‘Gaggle of Geeks’ on 2SER radio.
