The Proposition: Nick Cave takes a stab at film

[killafilm]

I saw this awhile back.

It's awesome.  Plain and simple.  Cave manages to pack a lot of story and characterization in under two hours.  I must admit that I've been on a western binge for the past two months or so.  But as it stands this is my second favorite film of the year.

[MacGuffin]

In brief: Winstone to play ladies' man
Source: Guardian UK
 
Ray Winstone has signed to star in Death Of A Ladies' Man, a new film from singer-turned-screenwriter Nick Cave and Australian director John Hillcoat. Winstone plays a sex addict who takes his son on a road trip along England's south coast. Cave and Hillcoat first teamed up on the acclaimed outback drama The Proposition. "It's a different take on the English kitchen sink, I bring an Australian sense of humour to it," said Cave. Production starts in September.

[Gamblour.]

It felt a touch slow at the beginning (though I was suffering from a large headache), but yeah, the last 45 minutes were fucking awesome. And there were so many flies in that movie, it really created this dirty, hell-on-Earth atmosphere.

[samsong]

so who else didn't like it?

[Gold Trumpet]

spoilers
The art circuit holds up yet another empty work with The Proposition. This film yearns to be a daring work. The graphic violence is unwavering as is the portraits of all the gloomy characters. They look as ugly and as mean spirited as people probably did back then. There is an inconformity in this film for not giving itself to the mythological Western of outlaws and endless beautiful terrain. As it so happens, Australia is the perfect setting to break this comfority. Jared Diamond said in Guns, Germs and Steel that Australia was the driest continent in the world. The film shows us the unattractiveness of its setting all the way through. The Proposition had a lot going for it, but in the end it is nothing more than a stock western.

The problems start at the beginning. The storyline defines itself by "the proposition", a deal set by a local ruling soldier when he captures two brothers of a known gang and says to the older one, "Go kill your wanted brother or your young brother will be hanged." This challenge of moral conscience for an outlaw to kill his own brother is reminiscent of the duties of James Coburn in Peckinpah's Pat Garret and Billy the Kid. The problem of The Proposition is that it doesn't give us that moral context that Peckinpah defined his Westerns by. Guy Pearce's character hunts down his brother to the silence of a typical Clint Eastwood movie. The character is challenged in many ways to murder his own brother, but the shooting and hesitating to kill him hardly has a context to stand on. A small argument is presented, but I'll get back to that. For me, the film just gets more graphic as it goes along.

Then there are the major cliches of this film. While Pearce's character provides the story with the silent gun fighter, Emily Watson rounds it out with the role of the respectable woman. In the 1930s and 40s Westerns were typified by two basic identities: what could draw the viewer in and what was the "presentable" way to tell the story for a conservative American public. The way to draw viewers in was through the usual role of good guys and bad guys. The presentable way was to juxtapose the role of men and women. Men could either be heroes or villians. Women could either be care givers or vixens. Emily Watson is the redeeming character who looks at this situation from the tragedy that it is. She is the character who is defined by the anxiety she lives with. The film isn't wrong to give her character this emotional center. The film is wrong to base its emotional center off her. With the slim context the film gives to the male characters, it is only redefining a cultural inadequacy that Westerns had with their limitations to give male characters a true emotional rendering. Guy Pearce's character is the silent type, but at the end we realize he is shy and hesitant to kill for the sake of killing. Why doesn't the film make that important at the beginning? Also, there is the situation of ruling soldier trying to prevent the flogging of the young character. He gives a practical excuse to the official who demands it, but he is obviously strained after it happens. His state of mind is only given one scene where Watson's character remarks that he looks deeply troubled and all we do is to continue to look at him contemplating something.

Back to the argument of when Guy Pearce turns around and kills his brother. The reason is a cause and effect of his younger brother dying. The death of his younger brother compelled him to do this. He wanted to stop the violence. Sure, but there are more questions for the scene: "Why didn't he go after the lawmen who were responsible for his early death?", "What compelled him to see look for peace when he was very easy going with a gun in earlier scenes?", "How tumultuous was the relationship between him and his older brother before all of this happened?" If the film did try to answer these questions the portrait would have been a lot deeper. The final killing was expected. The film had to clean all of the wrongs of the potential rape that Watson's character was facing. The way the film it did it so swiftly felt like a genre twist. There was little depth. It was an expected turn around. The film still left too many questions to end so easily. In the end, The Proposition only stands on the legs of its realism when it has very little to give us content wise.

[modage]

i liked everything that was there, but i did want more.  more motivation, more character, more gruesomeness.  for an hour and forty minutes i thought the film held surprisingly little.  it was enjoyable but not great.

[Pozer]

goodish? 

[Alexandro]

Finally I agree with GT on something after a long time.

The Proposotion is definetely empty and had room for so much more intellectualy and emotionaly. Context is scarce and I kept longing for some more. At the beggining I thoutgh this film was gonna be a masterpiece, that performances all around were gonna be historic, but in the end is an ok effort.

The emptiness didn't prevented me from enjoying it, of course. I think the way violence is depicted and the sound design kind of give us an idea of what people felt when watching a western for the first time back in old Hollywood and then back in Peckinpa's time. So The Proposition's nice contribution might be that is showing a very specific visual and auditive way to make westerns in the 21st century.

[Pas]

Just blind bought this one a few days ago. Very good yet left me wanting more.

Two of the best things in the movie are not mentioned in this thread : David Gulpilil (Jacko) is wicked (the scene when he translates for the police and starts barking is great) and also John Hurt in the role of the bounty hunter : ''Let us drink, then, to the Irish. No finer race of men have ever... peeled a potato.''

Emily Watson's character is the movie's whole problem. All of the time used to build up her story should have been used to build up the brothers' backstory AND the captain's of course.

The whole scene where she tells her nightmare : useless and also you can guess the whole nightmare when she says the first word of it. If you're gonna make a movie 90 minutes, make every one of them count.

[private witt]

Yeah, John Hurt stole the show, fo sho.

[john]

Just blind bought this one a few days ago. Very good yet left me wanting more.

When you get a chance, give it another viewing. I know everybody experiences a film differently, so there's no reason for my experience with it to mirror yours but...

The first time I saw this film, I was a bit thrown off by the pacing and score. I don't know what I expected, but what it delivered just wasn't it and I appreciated it, but was a bit underwhelmed and restless.

On repeat viewing, I totally succumbed to it and now regard it as one of the finest westerns released in the last decade... which is a slight accomplishment, mathematically, but still impressive when considering all the other fantastic westerns we've seen this decade.

Still can't really get into Cave's score, though, but his screenplay totally makes up for it.