*/****
starring Guy Pearce, Ray Winstone, Danny Huston, John Hurt
screenplay by Nick Cave
directed by John Hillcoat
by Alex Jackson In his review of Rene Cardona's exploitation quickie about the Jonestown Massacre Guyana: Cult of the Damned, Roger Ebert describes how Cardona ends the film with photos of the real-life victims while the audience is solemnly reminded "that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it," prompting Ebert to crack, "So remember, don't drink cyanide." I only wish that John Hillcoat's The Proposition were that lucid in delivering its Important Lesson. This is a movie at least as gory and brutal as Eli Roth's Hostel, the highlights being an exploding head and an extended, Gibson-esque flogging of a prisoner. And Hillcoat loves flies: they're always buzzing over the carrion, the human corpses, the gourmet meals, and the sweat of the film's grotesquely hairy Australian men. I don't have a problem with gore per se, but I do have a problem with the self-important joylessness with which it's depicted here–and frankly, The Proposition hasn't any justification for its austere tone. The proposition of the title is offered by Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone) to Irish criminal Charlie Burns (Guy Pearce); Stanley has captured Charlie's 14-year-old brother Mike and is prepared to hang the two of them for the murder of a family that included Stanley's pregnant sister-in-law. If Charlie can find and kill his second brother, the truly evil Arthur (Danny Huston), then both he and Mike will be absolved of their crimes. This sounds like a fairly standard western plot, but Hillcoat treats the material like Schindler's List. While I can't readily identify who we're meant to sympathize with, the characterizations aren't particularly nuanced: Mike is a victim; Arthur is a bastard; Stanley believes in justice; and Charlie, as played by straight-arrow Guy Pearce (a persona cultivated in L.A. Confidential and subverted in Memento), is a reluctant hero. The violence is moralistically ugly and we derive no vicarious pleasure from identifying with the anti-heroes, though in light of the equally moralistic finale, violence is shown to be just, too. The Proposition, then, can't be called either anti-violence or particularly nihilistic in its viewpoint. Good guys die horribly, bad guys die horribly, neutral guys die horribly–yet the ending shows that some deserve to die horribly more than others.
