As modern as Stanley's approach may seem, however, it appears considerably less sensible when we see how the rest of the town responds to it. His own men, a hard-drinking, crusty lot, think it's a sign of Stanley's weakness. They gossip about him, and his comely young wife, and word of the deal leaks to the townspeople, who are disgusted that men they believe to have butchered several of their own may escape punishment. And when Eden Fletcher (David Wenham), Stanley's superior officer, gets wind of it, he insists that Mike be publicly flogged, though it must inevitably appear to Charlie that Stanley welshed on the deal and will thus put Stanley and his wife at risk of what Arthur did to the other couple.

Like George Stevens's Shane (1953), The Proposition dramatizes the violence paradoxically necessary to civilize the frontier. Shane, however, is told with deliberate artifice as a black hat/white hat allegory, and there's never any examination of what "civilization" entails. The characters are arrayed with Jack Palance, the cattle baron's evil gunslinger, at the dark end of the spectrum and at the light end both Van Heflin, the decent farmer incapable of adequate martial self-defense, and Alan Ladd, the avenging, unreal, white knight. (Not to mention improbable, considering Ladd's dissipated-playboy face. The casting of Ladd as Shane is comparable to casting Tony Bennett as Lohengrin.) Shane attempts to make a storybook virtue of the average western's moral schematism, and I believe some people enjoy it for that very reason: they see "classical" where I see stilted.

In The Proposition, by contrast, Arthur squats at the dark end (and Huston, playing the part with both comic brashness and a sense of hauntedness, makes him a moody, Celtic goblin), but there's no one at the opposite end. Rather, the characters are arrayed on a curve so that Fletcher, the highest representative of law, is uncomfortably close to Arthur, and the greatest interest is in the middle, where we find Stanley and his wife, emerging from the barbarism of their surroundings and their own urgings. As Cave has conceived the story, the frontier is internal as well as external.

The proposition is the premise of the movie, its hook, but not its focus, and if, like me, you see the picture because you'll see anything with Guy Pearce in it, you may be somewhat disappointed. It's not a Guy Pearce movie, but that isn't a bad thing here. Unusually for a western, the most intriguing character is a woman, Captain Stanley's wife Martha (Emily Watson), who, with her delicate tea service and imported Christmas ornaments, her upright posture under her parasol, suggests the attempt to impose civil order on unruly nature (i.e., a setting where the characters "probably shouldn't be," according to Cave).