Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
If you live in Australia or the UK, this film is old news by now. Heck, I saw the import DVD on sale at Amoeba last week. But for those of us in the US, this one’s still heading toward its theatrical release. What can we expect when it opens? “DannyOcean01” has a review for us:
Hi guys,
Just finished watching The Proposition for the 2nd time on DVD, after seeing it a few weeks ago at the cinema. Needed a 2nd viewing to prevent this review from being an all out gush fest.
Anyway, I know this isn't getting a release till May in the US so I thought you might be interesting in an insight into this great Australian Western.
This is a film born of 3 fathers yet able to strike with its own individuality and power.
From the opening, chaotic attack on the tin shack housing the two bandits, Charlie and Mikey Burns, we recall Peckinpah’s elegiac Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Light bursts out from holes left by gunfire; whores scream and people are dropped by the crossfire. And then suddenly it goes quiet and we move to the relative calm of the aftermath.
Charlie (Guy Pearce) and Mikey Burns (Richard Wilson) are prisoners of Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone), a law enforcer for her Majesty’s government. After administering a savage beating to Mikey, Stanley makes Charlie the proposition of the title: Hunt and kill the remaining Burns brother, Arthur (Danny Huston), or leave Mikey to be hanged on Christmas Day.
From here the film splits into two. One line tracking Charlie as he searches for his brother, while Stanley attempts to ‘bring civilisation to the land’, maintain his position in the town and protect his wife, Martha (Emily Watson), from the horrors he witnesses.
The director John Hillcoat takes a finely structured Nick Cave script and nicely parallels these arcs, positing Charlie as the rational centre to the lawless brothers, an outsider now to the gang he rode with, while Stanley is the order, working to contain both his own men and the revenge thirsty towns people, including his own wife and the absurdly pompous land owner Eden Fletcher (David Wenham).
Through these parallels runs an unpleasant portrayal of race relations much as Ford attempted in some of his later Westerns. Here the black Aboriginals are presented in the same inhuman terms as Native Americans in the American West, and shot and brutalised. Once again, the two men are paralleled; Charlie blamed by the Aboriginal gang member for a death. He now stands outside both sides. Stanley, sensing the onrushing gang, tells his black servant to depart and before the man leaves the quiet tranquility of Martha’s rose garden he leaves his shoes in a pile by the path he might have tended.
It is here in the rose garden that the play on setting and the Western genre is most highlighted. As Charlie roams the wide burned out landscape in search of his brother, he is still chained by the plight of his brother and yet it is Stanley, in his plush and attractive town house, fronted by the civilised garden, who is most trapped, driven back eventually by the very people he is trying to protect.
Pearce makes an impressive Charlie; restricted to few words, he acts with his eyes and the measured movements of his body. Charlie is a killer, you have no doubt of that, but he’s collected, while Huston, as Arthur, is psychotic and verbose. Hillcoat, breaks up Charlie’s journey, skillfully cutting from location to location, presenting him almost as ghost, flitting to and fro. The similarity to Apocalypse Now and Sheen’s pursuit of Brando’s mad Colonel Kurtz is evident. Before we even meet him Arthur’s image hangs over proceedings, whether in silhouette or looming grotesque, rising out of shadow.
The film is clearly Western in its emphasis on setting, all blazing sunsets, stranded outposts and lightning strikes breaking the frame in two, but it also introduces horror elements bringing it as close to an adaptation of Cormac Mccarthy’s Blood Meridian yet. As many characters suggest, this place truly is hell. This apocalyptic atmosphere is very reminiscent of Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, with characters such as the always interesting John Hurt playing a bounty hunter meditating on the absence of God in this place. Peckinpah’s bible bashing characters would have loved him.
True, some of the lines give off a creak, Cave filling the mouths of characters with non sequiturs that would make Malick proud, but the overall poetry of the narrative, and the finely drawn characters force you to overlook these minor faults. It’s with Benoît Delhomme’s superlative photography and Winstone’s fantastic performance as Stanley where the film truly shines. Delhomme filling the screen with such striking images that I haven’t seen since Ford’s The Searchers, while Winstone produces a performance that moves repeatedly from anger to love to moral righteousness. In one of the best scenes in the film, Watson prepare Christmas dinner, as a foreboding tone slowly creeps in, Arthur and the Burns gang racing to exact their revenge. We see Winstone’s eyes flicker from his wife to his gun, as distorted violins from the fine soundtrack play over, desperate to maintain the happy mood, but knowing that something terrible is about to happen. It’s a great bit of acting.
With the violent climax we come full circle. Arthur resembling Slim Pickens from Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, stumbling through the Stanley’s rose garden and coming to a rest to greet the approaching twilight. It is a striking image to end with; an ending to a film that mixes familiar Western tropes with an unfamiliar setting that seems almost otherworldly and it’s yet another reason to hope that a Western renaissance is not far behind.
Wow. First, I had no idea Nick Cave wrote the film. That’s pretty cool. But from this review, I get a sense that Danny actually loves his Westerns (and knows his history), and that this is a film worth keeping my eyes open for later this year. Or heck... maybe I’ll just sneak back over to Amoeba later today...
"Moriarty" out.
