The Proposition

Toronto International Film Festival Program Book
2005

The Proposition
John Hillcoat
AUSTRALIA/UNITED KINGDOM, 2005
English 104 minutes Colour/35mm
Production Company: Autonomous/ Surefire Film Production LLP/ Jackie O Productions
Executive Producer: Sara Giles, Michael Hamlyn, Chris Auty, Norman Humphrey, James Atherton, Michael Henry, Robert Jones
Producer: Cat Villiers, Chiara Menage, Chris Brown, Jackie O'Sullivan
Screenplay: Nick Cave
Cinematographer: Benoit Delhomme
Editor: Jon Gregory
Production Designer: Chris Kennedy
Sound: Paul Davies
Music: Nick Cave, Warren Ellis
Principal Cast: Guy Pearce, Ray Winstone, Danny Huston, John Hurt, David Wenham, Emily Watson, Richard Wilson
Production: Autonomous

In 1988, Australian John Hillcoat directed one of his country’s greatest films: Ghosts…of the Civil Dead, a painfully graphic prison drama that skilfully combined poetic coloratura on the human cost of isolation with gang rape and breakout riots. Ghosts also marked the first foray into cinema for music iconoclast Nick Cave, a haunting presence, at the centre of the film as actor and screenwriter.

Cave and Hillcoat reunite for The Proposition, a film that harnesses the same angry power as Ghosts to dissect the outback romanticism of colonial Australia. Unflinching, Darwinian brutality is moderated by moments of lyrical introspection; silence and isolation form the inner worlds of frightened characters, making their bloody encounters all the more painful and exhilaratingly dramatic.

The Proposition is an anti-Western, a profane genre that resurfaces when society is weary of war and violence to interrogate the intentions of the Cowboy and the nobility of the Savage. Late in the nineteenth century, newly appointed lawman Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone) does everything in his power to protect his dainty wife Martha (Emily Watson) from the wicked frontier culture surrounding their village. When he captures Charlie Burns (Guy Pearce) and his psychologically unsound younger brother, Mikey (Richard Wilson)—Irish outlaws whose family is linked to atrocities in the region—Stanley makes Charlie a proposition: bring his psychotic, poetry-spewing older brother Arthur (Danny Huston) to justice and Mikey will live. This “deal” plays out in a violent maelstrom that consumes everything in its path.

It is hard to overemphasize the dramatic tension of this film or the excellence of its cast. Winstone is at his thundering best, vulnerable and headstrong, embodying the contradictions of colonial duty. Huston’s mad poet and Watson’s delicate ersatz princess are also extraordinarily well realized. John Hurt, playing a kind of dark sentinel drunk who pushes the story to its logical conclusion, is also wonderful, but it is Pearce’s deceptively wistful ambivalence that fuels the film’s mind-blowing tonal shifts and that forms its veiled moral core.
—Noah Cowan