The Proposition

First things first: The Proposition is a brutally violent film. Even though I knew there was a lot of violence, it was still shocking at times to see the level and graphicness of that violence. Anyone planning on viewing this needs to steel themselves for what they will see.

That said, it is also an extremely engaging film. As brutal as it is, one cannot turn aside. There is a scene when someone is being flogged in public and the whole town is watching. It is obviously an appalling sight, yet, they can't bring themselves to turn away. Watching this film is a very similar experience.

The story is set in the Australian Outback in the lawless days of the 19^th Century. The police captain for the area is out to "civilize this place." He is from England and tries to maintain a bit of that civilization in his home and with his wife. He has captured two outlaws, Charlie and Mikey Burns, who were wanted for their part in a heinous murder and rape. Captain Stanley offers Charlie a proposition that could save both his and his younger brother's life. Stanley knows that their older brother Arthur is the real source of evil in the family. If Charlie will track down and kill Arthur, Stanley will let Charlie and Mikey go free. If not, Mikey will hang in nine days -- on Christmas. The resulting struggle for salvation, vengeance, justice, and maybe even civilization, is as harsh as the landscape in which it is set.

The Outback is desolate, hot and deadly. In this film it serves as the Hell the characters live in. One character, a bounty hunter, says that he believed in God prior to coming to Australia, but when he got to the Outback, "the God in me evaporated." Flies are ubiquitous throughout the movie. It is as if we are being told that this is the realm of Beelzebub -- the Lord of the Flies. They are on everything, not only carcasses, but on people as they go through their daily lives -- as if they were living corpses.

The Proposition had a feeling similar to Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven and the Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns. All these films deal with a strong moral ambivalence in the characters as well as the brutality of frontier life. All these films have a sense of justice, but question if that justice can come by way of violence or if violence will in fact negate any justice that is sought.

Charlie is the one in the middle of everything. He is the middle brother and has to choose which of his brothers will survive; he is set between the law and his brother; it is in him that the battle between right and wrong is most clearly played out. He has (in the back story) already shown that he is not as bad as Arthur. In fact he has quit being part of Arthur’s gang and took the somewhat innocent Mikey to get him away from Arthur's influence. It's interesting that both Captain Stanley and Arthur tell him (in the same words) that he was right to leave and take Mikey with him. He can no longer accept the violence of Arthur's world, but is forced to live by that violence to survive and to save Mikey.

But the struggle is not just in Charlie; the whole society is struggling between what Stanley sees as civilization and the brutality of survival on the frontier. Those we expect to represent civilization, such as the police, are a horrid group. They are uneducated, cruel, racist bullies given the authority of the law. Those we expect to be most violent are at times the most cultured -- Arthur quoting poetry or fellow gang member Samuel singing an Irish tune.

In some ways this conflict can also be seen in Stanley and his wife, Martha. Stanley has carefully carved out a bit of civilization in his home. It is not at all like the other homes. There is a little garden surrounded by a fence to keep the Outback away from them. Whereas the rest of the town is always dusty and buzzing of flies, the Stanley home is immaculate. He tries to shelter Martha from town and the crude happenings there. Yet she comes, in her best English clothing, to give her approval to the flogging of Mikey. In that scene, Stanley is defeated; rather than bringing civilization, he sees the brutality has spoiled and soiled the one thing he sees as representing that civilization.

The battle between violence and civilization has certainly been played out in the Western genre through the years. Here that struggle gets what may be one of its most powerful (maybe too powerful) treatments. And as with Unforgiven, we are left with a sense of futility that as much as we might want to be peaceful, our natures will in the end defeat us and devour us.