Brutal, bloody and staggeringly brilliant, his 19th-century outback western was penned by Nick Cave and directed by his regular mucker John Hillcoat.
Even if you didn’t know it beforehand, you’d quickly recognise Cave’s discordant noodles and mournful tones on the soundtrack. If that failed to ring any bells, then perhaps the steady drip-feed of primal violence, Shakespearean grandeur and blackhearted humour would tip you off anyway.
This is Murder Ballads made celluloid ­– epic, edgy and contemptuous of the standards imposed by convention. It’s also an endlessly fascinating, morally complex proper Western despite the potential for Skippy sightings. When well-meaning pragmatist Captain Stanley (Winstone) rounds up two brothers from the notorious Burns family, he strikes a chilling bargain with one of them. If Charlie (Guy Pearce) can venture off into the outback to kill his psychotic older brother (Danny Huston), he can save his younger sibling (Richard Wilson) from the noose.
There are clear echoes of the cynical post-classical Western here, particularly The Wild Bunch and Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid. One would also be forgiven for citing the trippiness of El Topo or the lyricism of Terrence Malick. That said, The Proposition is very much its own thing.
The forbidding landscape runs contrary to the seductive sense of manifest destiny that characterises its American equivalent. Here, nature is running the show. Flies cover everything, teeth are terrible and the frontier is tenuous at best. As Stanley’s wife (Watson) makes dainty preparations for Christmas, civilisation plays out as a ridiculous folly, while colonisation is seen as a monstrous enterprise engendering all kinds of racial hatred. Aboriginals find themselves on opposite sides, and transplants oppress whatever comes under their feet. (“What is an Irishman but a nigger turned inside out”, slurs John Hurt’s bounty hunter.)
In common with his musical output, Cave’s script is capable of great tenderness and even greater violence. Heads are chopped with rusty implements or blown clean off with guns, but even irredeemable rapist-murderers like Danny Huston’s Arthur Burns can raise a gallows laugh or quote a line of poetry.
There are no bum notes here. Hasten to the cinema.