The Proposition

I suspect this Australian Western would have earned a plus if seen on the big screen, but the characters would still have been invested with antithetical attributes rather than rendered authentically complex. So the outlaw personification of evil actually loves sunsets and his brothers, and the lawman tries to impose civilization through low cunning and brutal violence. It’s all a bloody business, red in tooth and claw, but rendered aesthetically by John Hillcoat, a la Sam Peckinpaugh or Sergio Leone. The singer/songwriter Nick Cave, well known apparently but not to me, wrote the script that got the project made, and supplied the distinctive music. A roster of impressive acting talent was assembled -- Ray Winstone, Guy Pearce, John Hurt, Emily Watson, Danny Huston -- and the full mythic mode of Western storytelling was rolled out, with special attention to blood and dust, flies and sweat, the focus on the feral behavior of human jackals. It either overwhelms you, or it puts you off, or maybe both at once -- a reaction as self-contradictory as the characters themselves. (2006, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-73.)