THE PROPOSITION

Directed by John Hillcoat. Starring Ray Winstone, Guy Pearce, Emily Watson, Danny Huston, John Hurt

16 cert, lim release, 104 min

AMERICAN westerns, part of an endlessly flexible genre, concern themselves with many things, but most eventually get around to considering the effect civilisation has on virgin wilderness.

The Proposition, a searing, brutally violent revenge drama, which already feels like one of the great Australian movies, takes a somewhat different tack. Here, the bush country is so utterly forbidding, and most of the film's white anti-heroes so disinclined towards order, that civilisation seems a near-impossibility. The elegiac tone that so many American films adopt when dealing with the retreat of the frontier is surplus to requirements.

In John Hillcoat's movie, the bleakly beautiful Australian interior makes clear its intention to chew up any invaders and spit them back to the seaboard. The unforgiving conditions seem to have eaten their way into the script's structure and left it as raggedy and confused as a septic dingo. This is not meant as criticism.

Taking on elements of such Sam Peckinpah classics as The Wild Bunch and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, the film tells of the relations between three Irish brothers, outlaws, whose propensity towards violence varies in direct proportion to their age.

After a hideous gunfight at a settler's house, Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone), a colonial lawman, arrests young, introverted Mike (Richard Wilson) and intelligent, pragmatic Charlie (Guy Pearce). The morally divided officer makes a deal with Charlie: if the bushranger can capture and return the boys' eldest brother, Arthur (Danny Huston), a deranged amalgam of Mr Kurtz and a werewolf, then Mike will not hang. Choosing the life of a comparatively innocent sibling over one knee-deep in viscera, Charlie sets off for the outback.

The Proposition is based on a script by Nick Cave, who also wrote Hillcoat's fine Ghosts . . . of the Civil Dead, and it is rich in the sort of apocalyptic imagery that peppers the musician's famously grim songs. The dialogue can seem a little portentous at times, but, for the most part, its sparse Old Testament menace suits the extreme circumstances quite nicely.

It takes robust actors to deliver such lines with a straight face, but, fortunately, Hillcoat has cast the film to perfection. Winstone, playing, unusually for him, the most thoughtful individual in the film, brings indigestive integrity to the only character who understands that true civilisation may have more to do with justice and decency than the trivial accoutrements of western society.

At the other end of the Conradian spectrum, a bearded, mad-eyed Danny Huston, looking more like his father, John, than ever before, makes the case for nihilism. Guy Pearce's Charlie, not averse to a touch of homicide himself, is probably supposed to stand in for the audience's perspective. That alone identifies the picture as a very pessimistic work indeed.

Though this metaphysical jousting is intriguing, The Proposition's main selling points remain its evocative depiction of the blisteringly hot outback and its representation of the effects the conditions have on white men. No other film features quite so many flies. No other film displays such a varied profusion of rotten teeth and broken blood vessels. Never has wearying entropy been made to seem quite so gripping. If The Proposition is a western, then it's the best of the century so far.

Donald Clarke