Given that this was a Nick Cave-penned film set in mid-nineteenth century frontier Australia, The Proposition was almost exactly what I'd expected, and fully self-actualised as such - spectacular, gritty, violent, visceral, morally ambiguous and occasionally poetic. It wasn't exactly a fun film - Serenity, which was the other option, would've been a markedly different experience - but it was gripping and convincing, gaining a kind of cinematic-documentary feel from the combination of the graininess of its picture style and the panoramic landscape shots.
I thought that all of the actors were really good (Guy Pearce and Ray Winstone, as the real centres of the film, in particular), including those in relatively small parts or cameos - David Wenham, who's usually very good, was the only one who struck the occasional false note. And it had a very distinctive aesthetic - as an exercise in mythologising, it's effective (although, as may well always be the case with myths, much of that effectiveness comes from the extent to which it taps into archetypes which we already possess), and I wondered afterwards just how accurate a picture it gave of life in that time. It's not particularly preachy - Captain Stanley's determination to civilise the land is taken seriously, just as are Charlie's choices, and though the aborigines aren't ignored, the film seems unselfconsciously neutral in its stance towards the questions associated with those issues. Nor is there any shying away from the brutality and casual bigotry of the times.
To some extent, it's concerned with family and the bonds between people, but primarily, I feel that The Proposition locates its moral compass in extremes, and is a film 'about' human nature, extremes and extremity - what we find in people when they're pushed to their extremes, and how the choices that they make in those circumstances reveal and shape what they fundamentally are. Cave's vision is a brutal, harsh, near apocalyptic one - I always think of his music, especially the earlier Bad Seeds stuff, as very 'Old Testament' - but he's always thinking in terms of ambiguous redemptions and saving graces (his language, I think, not mine). One feels that he's carving a vision out of the Australian wilderness and history just as the Captain Stanleys and Charlies sought to do in their time, in building the idea of the nation.
