The Proposition (John Hillcoat, 2005) exports the golden American genre abroad, seamlessly translating it to the rugged rural interior of Australia near the end of the Nineteenth Century. With its longing plains and plunging hills, The Outback is at once cracked and weathered, like old leather, but uncharted and erratic, too. Its atmosphere is both primordial and evanescent. In other words, the open Australian landscape is ripe territory for a Western.
Ray Winstone (whose guttural growl would put hair on the naked chest of an infant alopecia sufferer) is sterling as Captain Morris Stanley, a grizzled former English cop whose declared goal is to "civilize" his new jurisdiction. Protecting the innocence of his clever but naive wife (Emily Watson, who quite capably but somewhat annoyingly plays the type of the lone woman caught in an eddying whirlpool of brutal manly beastliness) provides Stanley with a more personal motivation to curb the aptly titled Burns Gang and deliver their misanthropic leader, Arthur, to justice.
Besides embodying hirsute machismo and acting like a total badass steadily throughout - he readily cocks his gun at every person that stands in his way with the same monomaniacal intensity and Ahabian singularity of purpose - Stanley demonstrates the remarkable tenderness characteristic to domestic relationships of the period. Like any fond husband of the day, he employs certain conjugal tactics with his wife, such as avoiding her - despite her hunger for attention in light of her best friend's gruesome death - or stubbornly refusing to divulge her details that he'd rather withhold, no matter how persistent or nagging her queries. Such tactics do not make Captain Stanley a likely candidate for a Gloria Steinem activist award, but they do promulgate his affinity for and tendency towards obsessive control.
The plot is set in motion when Stanley captures and propositions Charlie - Arthur's younger brother - by asking him to kill his older brother. In exchange, Stanley offers Charlie and his younger brother, Mikey, a pardon for their sins. This proposition flips the Cain and Able thread on its head, requiring that Charlie hunt and destroy his elder sibling in order to protect his sniveling and wretched younger one. Faced with this choice, Charlie rides off into the wilderness, accompanied only by roguish music and a long, badass Winchester, in pursuit of Arthur.
Charlie's journey reminds one of Dante's descent into the bowels of Hell, the sights and people along his rehashing of Arthur's path representing the ever-deepening realms, the excavation of Arthur, himself, the meeting with the Devil. Through these ugly layers emerges an Old World social pyramid founded on unabashed racism. Here, assuming the role of Indians in American Westerns, the Australian aboriginals are cast as the odious Other, and are located at the very bottom of the social order, derided and hunted, the case for their humanity scoffed at. In their dark skin, which the white settlers perceive as a signifier of inferiority, the English see reflected their own warped morality, their own beastliness. The established English hierarchy also looks down on Irish settlers (the Burns clan being particularly despised) with a more subtle but equally sharp scorn; Irish "beastliness" is less excusable and more repugnant because their skin is fair, not dark like the aboriginals. Music flows throughout the film and the soundtrack, crafted by writer Nick Cave, provides simplistic and reductive insight into the three warring cultures; the aboriginal-inspired music shows them to be shamanistic poets, while the Irish are depicted as romantic balladeers. The conquering and self-righteous English sing corresponding tunes asserting their might.
The Devil - in this case, Arthur Burns - is always an interesting figure. Although he pledges his belief in the fundamental import of family and waxes an Emersonian philosophy of love for Nature and its purity, Arthur Burns ultimately deserves to be labeled a misanthrope, a label that he denies. It's rather a challenge to believe him, though, since he moves his clan to live in the mountains, far from civilization, and although their reverence for nature and Irish ballads is admirable, they go about raping, burning, and killing everything in their path. Inflicting agonizing pain on the meek doesn't often suggest a genuine predilection for humanity, or a heart as warm as Bambi's. In Arthur's defense, there's not much to love about this society's ruling class. The flies that swarm every scene, symbolizing the organic decay of moral order, do not discriminate between cop and bandit, Black and British.
The central theme to The Proposition is that of reciprocity; all action has inescapable consequences - it's only a matter of time before they catch up with you. In a land replete with such rampant self-righteousness and artificial social stratification, the law of reciprocity is the great equalizer. Neither status nor morality matter to a force like causality - the law of reciprocity applies equally to all. Unfortunately, by the time the characters look into the mirror, their actions have already been done, and all that remains is the reaction. That the climactic finish is staged at Stanley's English estate house, set beautifully but ill-fittingly into the desolation, emphasizes the power and inevitability of this truth.
The trailer should put a swing in your step.
No comments:
Post a Comment