Serendipity is one of my favourite words, both in sound and in meaning. Its meaning and importance were reaffirmed when I discovered a movie called ‘The Proposition’ by it. God bless Twitter and God bless Roger Ebert for tweeting so prolifically. I found the movie in a series of free-to-stream movies for Amazon special members, on a website recommended by him. The cast and Ebert’s own rating sealed it for me.
The movie starts with the credits being played to a cheery ballad in a child’s voice, while a series of black-and-white photographs show white men in uniforms alongside coloured men standing with rifles and muskets before colonial-style buildings on wide, flat lands. They end with 3 photographs: the first, that of a man, a very young boy and a woman lying on a bed, shot; the second, that of a woman lying in a coffin, about to be shut; and, the third, showing three graves alongside each other.
The movie opens right in the middle of a violent shootout in a whorehouse where we see a young, clean-faced man, nearly wetting himself with terror, while others around him try to duck bullets and fire back. The sound of bullets seems all too near, the camera is placed all too close to the people as they are shot to bits, in a cramped, sweaty, dusty room with wooden walls. By the end of it, everyone except the clean-faced man and another man, bearded and wild-haired are alive and seated at a table opposite a large, uniformed man, presumably a police-officer. The uniformed man, we learn, is Stanley (Ray Winstone), while the young man is Mike (Richard Wilson). The wild-haired man is Mike’s elder brother Charlie (Guy Pearce).
From the pictures during the credits, the clothes, the guns and the wooden walls it appears to be an usual wild West setting, until we hear Ray Winstone’s oaken, Cockney, voice ask of himself, ‘Australia, what fresh hell is this?’.
Stanley plans to hang Mike to death on Christmas Day, unless, of course, Charlie does his bidding. Stanley wants to bring a man called Arthur Burns to task, himself. He doesn’t necessarily want to kill him or catch him with his own hands, but see him broken, hurt and defeated the way he, Stanley, wants. Arthur Burns is, of course, Charlie’s elder brother, and “a monster, an abomination”, as Stanley calls him. He has been responsible for the deaths of the three members of the Hopkins family, including Mrs. Hopkins, who, at the time of her death was with child. To get at Arthur, Stanley wants to use Charlie. And if Charlie succeeds in doing what Stanley wants, he would pardon both him and Mike. When Charlie protests that he doesn’t ride with Arthur anymore, Stanley gives a small nod of understanding, gets up and smashes Mike’s nose with the butt of his revolver.
Burns is hiding in such a place where even the Aborigines dare not go. Stanley is sure he would be captured eventually by some bounty hunter, but he doesn’t want that to happen. He wants to make an example out of him. He wants to restore law and order in an essentially lawless land, “restore civilisation”, as he says.
Thus is the proposition of the title. And thus begins Charlie’s journey to bring his brother to justice for the sake of another brother.
Meanwhile, the proposition has been kept a secret between Stanley, the two Burns brothers and a handful of officers. The rest of the town, however, outraged by the shocking deaths of the Hopkins family wants to see quick justice being delivered. So do the men under Stanley’s command, even though they have been sworn to secrecy by Stanley.
Stanley’s wife Martha (Emily Watson) is a delicate, gentle, naive English rose. Stanley tries, with all his power, to keep her protected from the bestial nature of life at the police station. Martha has been deeply shocked at the death of the Hopkins family, more so, because Mrs. Hopkins was a dear friend of hers.
In one of the most disturbing scenes of the movie, the men under Stanley’s command are all sitting inside a tent, drinking and discussing how weak Stanley is, how wrong he is to deny them the satisfaction of watching two Burns brothers hang to death and how he is soon going to meet his end. The discussion quickly moves to his wife with almost every man lusting for her, with violent passions.
At the heart of the movie are the relationships of Charlie with his brothers, and of Stanley with his wife. Charlie is extremely protective of his younger brother, Mike, who is believed to be a “simpleton” by Stanley. Now Stanley knows this and uses it to his advantage and for what he feels is right. Dean Fletcher (David Wenham), who appears to be an administrative officer of the town, uses his position and power, and the rage of the people, to sentence Mike to an unspeakably cruel punishment, something he feels is right. In both cases this feeling of self-righteousness and the violence that it engenders, changes these relationships forever. Charlie is forced to agree to kill his own elder brother. Stanley, who is dead against Mike’s punishment (whether out of fear that it might kill him and incite the combined wrath of Charlie and Arthur, or out of genuine concern for Mike, or both, who knows?), is forced to relent when his wife stabs him with the question: what if it had been me? At the end of his ordeal, Mike is almost dead, Stanley is a living ghost and Martha faints. As Stanley lifts her up, tremblingly, she covers her face with her hands and bursts into tears of shame.
Honestly, every frame in this movie seems to be borne of violence. It doesn’t mean that there is physical violence in every scene. Every frame gives us a sense of the crazy heat, the violence going on in the characters’ heads, the effect of pitiless violence on the minds and lives of ordinary people, the morbid fascination, the sense of power, and finally, the sense of futility that it provides. Every frame seems to have struggled through all of this to finally give us a hard, unblinking, level-eyed look at the violence in man. The camera, at times, moves vehemently to mirror the onscreen violence; at other times it is languorous. The editing, too, is, at times, delicate, at times, strident.
The music is unlike anything I’ve heard in a movie. It is mostly composed of a wind-instrument (an organ, I think) deftly intercut with a mournful violin, all set to a distinctly electric, deep bass. The effect is shattering, although very sparse. It generously provides this otherwise brutally harsh movie with a touch of the poignant, the elegiac. At times, the sundtrack is engulfed by a rustling whiper rendering a few snatches of rhyme, as if the very voice of the land itself is trying to speak to its inhabitants. Nick Cave, who composed the music, also wrote the screenplay for the movie. God bless his soul.
Watching this film, I realised how relatively spruce and clean other modern Westerns like ‘The Quick and the Dead’, ‘Appaloosa’, ‘3:10 to Yuma’ and (to some extent) the Coen brothers’ ‘True Grit’ are. Though well-made and shot, with authentic costumes and production design, the actors look as if they just stepped out of their trailers and into the costumes. I realised this after watching the actors in this movie. They look as if they have been living in such a wild land for years. Guy Pearce is almost unrecognisable: he is almost size zero, his face looks cooked rare, the veins starting out on his forehead. John Hurt looks even more craggy than usual, his voice more cracked than ever. Danny Huston looks like a wild beast with his wide eyes, wolfish leer, bare-chested way of dressing and his sheer depravity. Ray Winstone looks like he’s been sitting in a sauna in the middle of the desert. Their hair is stringy, it looks as if it was hacked off, not cut, yet bunched up with sweat, dust and oil. Ditto their skin. Their faces are burnt brown by the oppressive heat. The gang of outlaws are dressed in clothes that have gone limp with the sweat and dust. Their teeth are yellow, rotting. Their bodies are hardened/ emaciated by the conditions, crusted with grime. There are flies buzzing around all the time, around the living and the dead. Both are rotting.
The camera manages to capture this heat and grime even when it’s not looking at the actors. The frames are shot through with a fierce, burning glow. The landscape of the Australian Outback is vast, endless stretches of plain rocky desert. Yet, it is not shot panoramically or romantically. The long shots are seen through a simmering haze of heat. The few wide shots that are there only serve to show the utter desolation and unending harshness of the landscape, and how frail and foolish man looks before it.
This might make for really morbid reading, but there are several factors that determine how real blood looks onscreen. Its shade, its consistency/viscosity, the way it flows out of a body, the volume that flows out of a body part, the way it flows off other surfaces, the residue it leaves behind, its appearance on clothes, the way the scene is lit, the colour tone/ filters used. I have not seen a more real or frank depiction of blood on film till date, than here. I sense that a considerable effort has been put into getting it right. And it is all with a purpose. In showing us the ugliness of violence, this movie is peerless. I doubt that anyone would be enamoured of the violence here. The people are violent either by choice or because they have no choice. Mostly, in a land as feral as Australia in the late 19th century, it was the former.
It comes as no surprise that the acting, in a movie as uncompromising as this, is of the highest calibre. It is needless, really, to comment on actors like Ray Winstone, John Hurt, Danny Huston and Guy Pearce. I would still like to single out two performances. The first is that of Emily Watson. Even with as distinctive a feature as her eyes, she manages to convince us of her chameleonic ability in film after film. She is as convincing as the tart maid in ‘Gosford Park’, as she is as the quiet, understanding, yet fiercely smart woman who steals Adam Sandler’s heart in ‘ Punch Drunk Love’, and equally so as Ralph Fiennes’ blind muse who evokes strange, terrifying passions in him in ‘Red Dragon’. Here she provides the only source of innocence and beauty amidst the general savagery. Yet, it is tragic to see her character fall prey to the kind of self-righteous anger mentioned above. But what other choice does she have? In the character and her superb portrayal, the movie, and we, the audience, observe, with queasy horror, how completely vulnerable such innocence is, in the face of such monstrosity.
The second is David Wenham. He plays Fletcher as a man of holier-than-thou fastidiousness. He is the only one who seems reasonably civil and well-groomed when compared to the animals around him. He represents the entire British colonial administration of that period in his hypocrisy and prim, moral superiority. With his high voice, unctuous inflections and darting glances of barely-concealed lust at Martha, his act is spot-on. My lower jaw lay on the floor when I learnt that the same actor had played the stately, humane Faramir in ‘The Lord of the Rings’ trilogy.
Recently, Amitav Ghosh, when asked about the depiction of savagery in his books ‘Sea of Poppies’ and the upcoming ‘River of Smoke’, replied that had he decided to write some of the more brutal events (that actually happened and have been documented), into the books, his readers would not believe it. It’s true. It is a different time and place from our own and we cannot imagine ourselves to be capable of such behaviour unless we have some way of really being there. It is impossible, of course, but movies like this one, Schindler’s List, There Will Be Blood, and novels like Sea of Poppies, Blood Meridian, Sacred Hunger are successful, to some extent, in transporting us to those worlds. In making us, somehow, feel an infinitesimal portion of the life they depict, in all their glory and shame.
For some reason, I find a similarity between 'The Proposition' and 'Gangs of New York'. Both films are made by artists trying to understand the past of their respective nations and bring it to life for audiences, for them to know and remember the birth and nascency of the nations. In both cases, the period of history dwelt upon is little-known or largely forgotten. And, anything but flattering.
Here, we are witness to the use of Australia as a penal colony, where the only difference between outlaws and the Queen's soldiers is a uniform. Between the two, in a twilight zone, are the bounty hunters, a law unto themselvesin a place no one really abides by laws. Into such a place explodes this story, ostensibly of a sheriff trying to bring an outlaw to justice, but running along deeper lines of nation, race and family. The English look down upon the Irish (with, presumably, a large outlaw population) with suspicion and distaste. Needless to say, they have made the Aborigines thier slaves, treating them as they please, either as animals in chains, or as sepoys, scouts and runners. Either way, they are collateral damage in the crossfire, they, the original inhabitants of the land, the "foreigners" now fight their blood-feuds on.
This movie scarred me. I have been affected by movies in the past. I have felt miserably sad, angry, weird, frustrated, drunk with happiness, exhilarated, thrilled, sleepy, disgusted, horrified by movies. But this movie has scarred me. It has, through some arcane alchemy, taken numerous elements, all of which I have seen and experienced before, and converted them into a sum total so powerfully abrasive, that I have been eroded into something new. Maybe not too different from what I was. But yet, how many movies can lay claim to having such an ability? For me, from the recent past, only ‘Underground’ and ‘The Believer’ come to mind.
P.S. Mel Gibson, in response to a similar question asked about ‘Apocalypto’, had given an answer similar to what Amitav Ghosh had given. Gibson, I feel, could learn a thing or two from John Hillcoat, the director of this film, and a fellow Australian.
