The Bishop on The Proposition

Like surprisingly many pretentious things, The Proposition is, intermittently, engaging, though whether this is due to its attempted gravitas, or the relief occasioned by its intermittent let ups from pretension (here, in the form of cleverly surprising snaps of violence), it is difficult to say.

Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone, miscast) captures outlaw Charlie Burns, and his younger brother, Mikey, and makes him an offer: go out into the desert and kill his older, far more criminally dangerous brother, Arthur, and the two will be pardoned. Otherwise, Mikey will be hanged. No convincing reason is presented for why Captain Stanley makes this pact, except to give the film its title, and its plot. Unless, sensing that he is in a film, he has some meta-dramatic awareness that Charlie is not all that bad.

No character in The Proposition could be said to bare any resemblance to anyone who ever lived. Guy Pearce’s Charlie Burns is a man of so few words, and not much more action, that the Bishop, at least, never really caught his shtick. Captain Stanley behaves according to the dictates of the plot, then frets about it; and Emily Watson, as Martha Stanley, is about as well-thought-out as she is tanned. David Wenham has in other roles displayed a knack for finesse, but it is soon clear that his Eden Fletcher is only here to be hated (perhaps writer Nick Cave felt his otherwise ‘grey’ characters would look greyer against a background of black). Wenham, with nowhere to go, revives the horrid Australian tradition of kooky kitsch, and it is only the actor’s unassuming charm that saves him. Arthur Burns, pasted into scene by Danny Huston, reminds the Bishop of one of those mute bikers from Mad Max II—even down to the way he is shot: head craned forward as if looking for something but not quite sure what, hair gusting back like the parting of the Red Sea. Again, like Wenham, he has a nip of charisma, but seems to have taken those acting classes where one pretends to be a tree (or, in this case, a rock) too seriously. John Hurt, biting into the superfluous, and supercilious, Jellon Lamb, is the only one present who realises that Cave intended to provide his thespians with poetry, and declaims accordingly. (Hurt should do more Beckett; always weathered, he is starting to remind your canonical critic of the face of a crumbling cliff.)

John Hillcoat directs with little enthusiasm or élan, but for an ability to quickly bring the violence front and just-off-centre from a background of calm—though this may simply be because his calm is too calm, almost as if it has fallen asleep. Still, praise where it’s due, and one or two moments deserve attention. One: Captain Stanley is startled from his slumber by the sound of gunfire. He jumps up, panics, and promptly runs into a door. Hillcoat leaves him in the background, keeping the focus on his wife, and the effect of this muffled shot is to share Stanley’s disorientation, as if we had run into the door, too. Later, Charlie is roused from a desert sleep to find his horse dead. The not-quite-competent Charlie looks around in every direction except that of an incoming spear. Pierced (pardon the pun), he looks up to find his attackers, a gang of aboriginal ‘rebels’, stationed on the rise like burnt trees. Then, still in long shot (and from Charlie’s point of view), one of them is shot in the head. The whole threat rising from these elements is greater than the sum of its parts; it is like watching dominos fall.

Cave, apparently, wrote The Proposition in three weeks, and it shows. Had he spent another three, he might have trimmed two unnecessary characters, and fleshed out the plot. Like A History of Violence, previously discussed by the Bishop, The Proposition is too lackadaisical to entertain dramatic tension—too self-consciously dark to establish empathy (could any viewer, for example, really care less if Mikey Burns is hanged or not?). Cave fails to realise one does not have to approve in order to identify, and so the film’s injustices become simply a pretext for contemplating, and committing, violence.

What Cave does do, however, is paint his characters in such an even shade of gris that his musings on the human condition are welcome, or at least tolerable—there could be no proselytising from these opportunists. And while they cannot speak for humanity—because they are cartoon figures with only the trappings of verity: cheap hooch, blood and stubble—one is at least aware that that is what they are supposed to do. Cave’s eye, too, is much better than he probably realises. He could, it seems likely, pen an astute screenplay—there are too many inventive touches here to believe otherwise—once he learns to link one encounter to another in the Aristotelian sense. And leave out the fucking poetry. A scene in which Martha Stanley recalls a nightmare to her husband was a painful for the Bishop as it must have been for her.

One final point, on the Australian outback as mythic landscape. The Bishop has never really found it equal to John Ford’s American West, or even Sergio Leone’s Italian scrub; with it’s strangled trees, deformed canyons, and scattered, greying rocks, it looks more like the place where, during the Creation, God dumped his rubbish. It is still a worthy backdrop, though, an opportunity to show us sunburn instead of sunset; a land of boredom, flies and matted sweat, there is a real sense that one could die there. The Proposition almost captures that, but the Bishop wondered why more was not made of the oppressive desert heat (the film is set at Christmas, during the Australian summer). The Burns gang take on mystical qualities among the indigenous population for their ability to thrive in no man’s land, but Cave and Hillcoat just assume their spiritual connection to the place—we never really get to see why.