I suspect it won’t be long before we start reading articles about how Hollywood has decided it’s time for a return to the westerns of old. You know, the kind with good guys and bad guys, fast guns and heroes who ride off into the sunset. Ah, those were the days. Now look at what we get: first gay cowboys (in Brokeback Mountain) and now, with The Proposition, grungy cowboys.

Written by Nick Cave, the gloomy Australian balladeer, and directed by John Hillcoat, best known for his rock videos, The Proposition is a kind of anti- western western. You won’t find any good guys or bad guys here.

It is literate, with spurts of lyricism and loads of blood. And flies. Lots of flies. Everywhere. I’ve heard of actors who chew the scenery. Here the actors are chewed by the scenery — at least, the flies. You have to be a talented fly to steal a scene from the likes of Ray Winstone and Guy Pearce, but these flies have the best buzz in the biz.

Hillcoat has said he wanted The Proposition to be an Australian western. How, you may wonder, is that different from an American western? Well, The Proposition has many traditional western themes: loyalty, revenge, law and order. What makes it uniquely Australian is the harshness of the landscape. The American frontier, with its big blue skies and open ranges, spoke of freedom and infinite possibility. The Australian outback of the 1880s, when The Proposition is set, is a place to be endured like a prison sentence. It has the beauty of sunsets — the cinematographer, Benoît Delhomme, captures them brilliantly — but it’s a land that shows no mercy.

This, then, is the setting for a conflict between civilisation and barbarism. Captain Stanley (Winstone) is a British law enforcer with a mission: he has come to Australia to bring civilisation. Standing in his way are the Burns gang, a clan of Irish bushrangers who are wanted for the brutal murder of a local family. When Stanley and his men capture Charlie Burns (Pearce) and his simple-minded 14-year-old brother Mikey (Richard Wilson), he offers Charlie a proposition: kill your evil older brother, Arthur (Danny Huston), and I’ll pardon you and Mikey. If you don’t, Mikey will hang. It’s an offer Charlie can’t refuse and can’t accept. Charlie wants to protect Mikey, and Stanley wants to protect his wife, Martha (Emily Watson), from the brutalities of their world. Together at home, Stanley and Martha maintain a tiny oasis of European life and civility, with their fine china, and roses in the garden.

The first part of the film follows Charlie as he makes his journey to find his brother, who lives in caves in such a remote part of the outback that even the Aborigines won’t go there. In Arthur, civilisation and barbarism meet in equal measure. He’s a cultured killer who recites poetry and seems to spend most of his time staring at the sunset. The question is: will Charlie be able to kill Arthur? Meanwhile, Stanley faces his own struggle. His boss, Eden Fletcher (David Wenham), doesn’t like the deal he’s made with Charlie, and the townsfolk want Mikey flogged. The irony is that Stanley’s civilising mission is being undermined by forces that are meant to be on the side of civilisation.

The Proposition is without doubt the most visually uncomfortable film I’ve ever seen. It gives new meaning to the term dirty realism. I could handle the outpouring of blood, the decaying animals, the whirlwind of flies, the filthy teeth, the sweat, the sight of a head exploding — but the filthy hair of Charlie and the rest of the gang was hard to endure.

I don’t really get the point of films like this. Who wants westerns to be realistic? It’s like expecting fairy tales to be based on fact. There’s something so puritanical about it that it’s unable to make room for the traditional pleasures of the western. It’s an austere film that too often relies on a Peckinpah-like brutality to make an impact. It wants to show us how things really were back in the 1880s and, okay, it does this rather well. But in the end I thought: yeah, yeah, life was nasty, brutal and violent back then. Civilisation grows from the compost of human cruelty; people had dirty hair, awful teeth and were mean to Aborigines. But we know all this.

The Proposition is earning a lot of critical praise, but in a few years’ time, I doubt audiences will remember any of these characters. By contrast, those in a more conventional western such as The Magnificent Seven or High Noon will ride on in our minds for ever.



The Proposition, Two stars
18, 104 mins