Movie Review: John Hillcoat's The Proposition: The Frontier - Page 4

At the same time, Martha's developing attentiveness to the situation echoes ours, and she gives the story its grounding in the qualities of the novel. (The advance of modern society seems also to entail a transition from ballad, heroic saga, and epic to descriptive naturalism. The one major failing in this regard is Stanley's unpreparedness for Arthur's final attack.) Stanley's job thus isn't set solely in the polarized moral context of melodrama. It's seen politically as well by showing that the proposition fails, in the first instance, because Stanley commands insufficient respect among his men, and then because he has inadequate support from his superior officer.

This view is rounded out by the social context — how word of the proposition affects Martha with the townsfolk and how it infects the Stanleys' personal relationship. Martha starts out wide-eyed, i.e., "innocent" (though not incapable of inflicting harm, as the etymology suggests), and what she undergoes opens them wider, though in a different sense. It also serves as a bonding experience with her husband, as if, by the end, she can finally understand what he's been up against and where he's been coming from.

The Proposition also has a sweated-in novelistic sense of place. Shot during a sweltering Queensland summer, the overdressed, underwashed Victorian colonials are swarmed by flies. In the interview above, Cave said of the shoot, "Nobody could even open their mouth without a fly crawling into it," and Hillcoat added, "[W]e were sharing the secrets of how to cope with swallowing flies...I kept saying 'flies are our friends,' trying to encourage them to be part of the story. Which they ended up being."

The movie does not, however, have the visionary quality of the most staggering westerns, Fred Schepisi's The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978) from Australia and Geoff Murphy's Utu (1983) from New Zealand, for instance, in which the romance of the outlaw is inflected with an epic-tragic sense that history is being irreparably blotted in the meeting of the pioneer and aboriginal cultures. Sam Peckinpah in the U.S. wasn't able to condense an historical outlook in a turbulent anecdote in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) to equal these movies (Pat Garrett's complex ambitions die along with the helpless, pathetic Mexican at the hands of the evil cattle baron's men), but in The Wild Bunch (1969) he certainly rode the romance of western masculinity to the end of the line.

There is, however, some sense of the tragic side of Australia's history in The Proposition when, for instance, Fletcher upbraids Stanley for having killed a black during a recent raid. He's upset because Stanley killed only the one and now the survivors will seek revenge; it would have been better to kill them all. And when Stanley, preparing for the attack by the Burns brothers, sends his native gardener away, the man stops at the gate and removes his European shoes before walking out into the wasteland. It's a lovely, poetic gesture delivered on the ambiguous borderline between the two cultures.

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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