The Proposition
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Movie Reviews of The Proposition
Movie Review: A One-Sided Gunfight
Summary: 4 Stars
This is a gorgeous film, offering one of the few close, accurate depictions of the "wild west" of the Australian outback. It is an "arty" western, with lots of sunsets and a lovely sound track which mixes native traditional instrumentation and modern "Western" sounds to good effect. The acting is superb - lots of memorable faces, including a few Aborigines. The story is predictable, but nothing else is. But in the third act,it is not at all clear why the protagonist leaves himself wide open for attack. It is as if he had suddenly become incompetent, or had lost the will to fight. The fine dining scene just doesn't make sense to me. Why were there no guards, no dogs, no alarms. Still, apart from plotting, the film is a welcome surprise. Movie Review: Had it's moments but hard to stay awake at times
Summary: 3 Stars
I really wanted The Proposition to be good. It had an excellent cast including the almost always reliable Ray Winstone and the excellent Guy Pearce. However, this film was not as good as I had thought it would be. Sure, it conveys the savagery and the grime of the Australian outback in the 18th century but the story plodded along and the climax of the film was quite disappointing.
With such an array of good actors and material, it could have been so much better. The story was written by Nick Cave, the Australian "singer" and dark lord of grumpy indie murder ballads. Sure , it had plenty of violence and pessimism about it but it was gore for the sake of gore and the film ended unsatisfactorily.
Movie Review: violent art western from Down Under
Summary: 4 Stars
"The Proposition" is a grim, atmospheric western set not on the American frontier but rather in the Australian outback of the 1880's.
Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone) is a police officer sent from England to impose law and order on the largely uncivilized populace inhabiting that newly settled region of the world (his jurisdiction includes aborigine natives as well as the recently arrived whites). Those orders set Stanley in direct opposition to the Burns Gang, a notorious band of thieves and cutthroats comprised of three Irish brothers who are suspected in the rape and murder of one of the most prominent and influential families in the territory. After Stanley captures two of the men, he imprisons one - the weak, sniveling Mikey - and frees the other, Charlie (Guy Pearce), threatening to hang Mikey if Charlie fails to hunt down and kill the third brother, Arthur, purported to be the vile ringleader of the group. Thus is set into motion a brutal, violent tale of revenge and justice that soaks the exquisite Australian landscape in generous helpings of blood and gore.
"The Proposition" is not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach, as it literally rubs our noses in the violence it is portraying. In vivid, unflinching detail, the movie captures the inhumanity and bloodshed perpetrated by the characters on one another throughout the course of the story. Stanley is an unlikely central figure for the tale, since even though he begins as a hardnosed, unyielding stickler for law and order, he turns out, in the long run, to be one of the most reasoned and restrained players in the drama. In fact, he faces intense opposition from the townsfolk for being too lenient with his prisoners and too slow in exacting justice for the horrible crimes committed. Stanley, who is also deeply devoted to his loving wife, stands as a kind of transitional figure linking the barbarous past with the hopefully more "civilized" future of this continent uniquely tucked away in its own little corner of the world.
The second major character is Charlie, who has to decide between betraying his older brother by killing him in cold blood or letting his younger brother swing at the end of a rope if he doesn`t. Unfortunately, Charlie is not nearly as fully developed a character as Stanley is, nor is his moral dilemma as clearly developed or dramatized either. We don't get the sense that we know much about Charlie even after we have spent quite a bit of time with him which is a shame since his thought processes and actions are pivotal to understanding the outcome of the story. Perhaps more successful is the portrayal of Stanley's wife, Martha (Emily Watson), who is torn between her innate compassion for humanity and her desire to have her dear friend's death avenged by the public execution of the men responsible for the heinous crime.
What distinguishes "The Proposition" from so many other westerns is its deliberate moral ambiguity, its recognition that people don't always fit into nicely wrapped packages of good and evil, and that fairness and justice are not always the clear-cut commodities we've been taught to believe they are from literature and movies. And all this is done against a stark natural landscape that stands as a mute, indifferent witness to the insanity of the humans' actions.
Pearce, Watson and, especially, Winstone deliver remarkably restrained, understated performances as the three main characters caught up in the drama. After all, with all the blood and carnage up there on the screen, the last thing the film needs is a bunch of over-emoting actors adding to the excess of it all.
"The Proposition" is clearly not for everyone, but diehard Western aficionados would be remiss in not seeing it.
Movie Review: Guilty all
Summary: 4 Stars
Beautifully photographed, well acted with a heavy dose of Peckinpah. What's not to like. You know Christmas is not going according to plan.Movie Review: Stunning and Challenging
Summary: 5 Stars
I loved everything about this movie: the novelty of an Australian Western; the freshness of viewing racism from perspectives other than American blacks and whites (in this case, Aboriginal indigenous people vs. white colonialists); the absence of likeable characters- any virtue evidenced by Charlie Burns (Guy Pearce) and Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone) was only due to the loathsomeness of those around them; and the pointless cycle of revenge killing. This is the antithesis of a feel-good story, and depicts the moral relativity of an extreme environment. The movie is extremely violent, but importantly, not pointlessly so; I'll take The Proposition's brutality over Scorsese's The Departed's any day of the week, for its realism, its appropriateness in context, and its evocation of sympathy.
This is largely a movie about setting, and about how a stark environment can beget an obdurate, stark people. It's the late 19th Century Australian extreme version of how American cities bear witness to greater violence during particularly hot summers- in the Proposition, every day is sweltering, everyone is pissed, and everyone is violent. The movie simply could not have done a better job of conveying that setting: the characters are so dirty you can almost smell them through the screen; Nick Cave's bleak musical score is hauntingly beautiful (Cave wrote the script as well); and the scenery is craggy, and the whole landscape looks like an overdeveloped photograph. It's a beautiful combination, though, and I daresay without any proof that the movie is an authentic depiction of life in that area at that time. A stunning film.