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May 05, 2006

'The Proposition': Cave Dwelling at its Blood-Spattered Best

Grime of the Century: Guy Pearce (L) hunts down fugitive brother Danny Huston in the grisly Aussie Western The Proposition (Photo: Kerry Brown)

Time is short this afternoon, so let me get right to it: I have my money on The Proposition as one of the best films we will see in 2006. Sure, on paper, it looks too good to be true: Gothic-ana icon Nick Cave wrote and co-scored it. John Hillcoat (Ghosts of the Civil Dead) directed it. Its cast features Guy Pearce, Ray Winstone, Danny Huston, John Hurt and Emily Watson, an ensemble that pretty much directs itself (all due respect to Hillcoat). The story is simple yet harrowing enough: To save himself his simple-minded outlaw brother from execution, a ruthless criminal in 1880s Australia must track down and kill his even more vicious older brother to the colonial authorities. What could go wrong?

Not much, to be honest. That is, as long as you do not mind liberal bloodshed with your gripping moral crisis. Pearce portrays Charlie Murphy, the middle brother in a crime gang wanted for the devastating murder of a family in the Australian outback. After the single-minded Captain Stanley (Winstone) captures Charlie and his brother Mikey in the film's opening shoot-out, his proposition--find one brother (Huston), save two--quickly establishes a land of lost causes, where grime-encrusted anti-heroes roam scorched landscapes on their ways to certain doom.

Cohabiting in the desert with other fugitives (such as Hurt's poetic, menacing Jellon Lamb), mercenary Aboriginals and immense, swarming green flies, Charlie's quest settles into the cycle of violence and myth that Cave has been exploring for more than two decades.

"I think I just approached it rhythmically, if that makes any sense," Cave told me back in January before the film screened at Sundance. "I wanted a film that was thoughtful and melancholy--that one is jolted awake by acts of violence. That's the sort of atmospheric rhythm that exists in a lot of the songs that I write anyway. So that felt quite natural to do that, I think, because I didn't really know what the story was going to be when I was writing it. It was a film structurally about counterpoint--you have a quiet scene, then you have something that's sharp. One scene plays off the next scene. It was very much like that in the actual script."

The counterpoints transcend structure, however. Nuanced characters like Captain Stanley and his devoted wife (Watson) fight to reconcile frontier justice with the civil order they came from England to establish. Charlie Burns's choice is hardly a choice at all, but as with most of the men in The Proposition, his balance of good and evil is so evenly calibrated that viewers almost hate themselves for sympathizing with him. In forcing us to face our own judgments, Cave and Hillcoat (above) have made more than just another revisionist Western--they have made the ultimate existentialist Western.

Oh, and it is entertaining. Winstone and Huston in particular flourish in Cave's gorgeously precise language, while stunning, gruesome flashes of violence arrive literally from nowhere. Pearce approaches Charlie's ebb-and-flow amorality with the same filthy poker face, barely hinting at the battle of conscience unwinding behind his eyes. Chatting with The Reeler last week, Pearce and Huston credited the brutal shooting conditions (130 degrees Fahrenheit) in part for their characters' haunted resonance.

"It's not a matter of trying to stay focused in spite of it," Pearce said. "I find that inspiring. How can you be distracted by it? It's all encompassing--that environment, that heat, that world. You really have nothing you have to do once you're in it."

"It's how you move," Huston said. "It's how you deliver your dialogue. The violence is sudden, and then it's a burst of violence, because to move too soon you wouldn't be violent anymore by the time you GOT to your violent act. You'd be exhausted form the heat."

"There's just an earthiness that becomes mythic," Pearce added a moment later. "It becomes really spiritual, and it's very easy to take the film to a whole new level because of being out there. It gets you out of your head and into your body and into the environment. And you become sort of this wild creature having to live in a particular hide in a particular way because of where you are."

Meanwhile, Hillcoat celebrated cinematographer Benoit Delhomme, whose work captures the impact of such oppressive space, heat and chaos on a culture's best intentions. "He just couldn't believe it was this excess of light that he had never seen," Hillcoat said of Delhomme. "He couldn't believe how intense it was. ... With Australian DP's, and if you're living in Australia, you get so influenced by your own culture. I really wanted to avoid the whole Qantas ad--the huge blue sky. It suited Priscilla: Queen of the Desert, because it was a kitsch thing. We also wanted to capture how it's so much like an aggressive character in the daytime--how it's aggressive and hurts and you're squinting. And yet at sunset it's absolutely breathtaking."

Breathtaking pain--just the summer movie alternative you were hoping for as Tom Cruise tears the city from beneath our feet. But even The Proposition's bloodthirsty torture regimens are a little more humane than what Paramount subjected us to on Wednesday, so do not think I have any compunctions about recommending an Australian Western over a massive-budget spy franchise. Just trust me on this one.

(Photo of Nick Cave and John Hillcoat: Polly Borland)

Posted by stvanairsdale at May 5, 2006 03:37 PM

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Posted by: Jason Okamoto at May 7, 2006 06:19 AM