Film Review--The Proposition

I saw the Nick Cave written Australian western, The Proposition, last night. Here's a few thoughts:

1. The first thing I wondered when I heard about this movie is how it fit into the western genre. It certainly makes sense to have westerns set in Australia. It has both the landscape and the disturbing history for many interesting stories. Perhaps there is a whole set of Australian westerns. I don't know. If anyone has seen any of them, let me know. At the very least, the movie certainly fits into type of subwestern genre: that of the violent, hellish western, originally pioneered by Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah. In fact, I was reminded in several places of the B Spaghetti Westerns from directions like Sergio Corbucci. The acting was much better than those movies. It's not even close to fair to compare Guy Pearce with someone like Franco Nero. But they have the same template--the West as hell, home to human depravity, iniquity, subhuman behavior, selfishness, and death. This is OK, but the western has much more to it than that. For a real Australian western genre to exist, I think there also has to be the other kind of western--that where the West is a place of opportunity, individual courage and sacrifice, and redemption. Certainly the two can (and must) coexist. The John Ford style western has certainly fallen out of favor over the past 30 years, and perhaps for good reason. But without that vision for newer directors to play off of, The Proposition, like the non-Leone spaghetti westerns of the 1960s, lose something important. The become horror films set in a western landscape rather than anything different or interesting within the genre. For me, this is inherently uninteresting, though that is clearly an aesthetic choice on my part rather than any objective statement.

2. I found it quite interesting to read the comments for the movie on imdb.com. One problem with modern movie fans is the idea that no character can be entirely black or white. Several comments for this movie express glee over the fact that everyone comes off muddied. That can be OK, but I think this cynicism within movie fans gets old. Sometimes a really good guy can be a wonderful thing. A question to these fans--would there be room for Henry Fonda in your ideal picture? Or does every movie have to have Pulp Fiction-style characters. This reminds of a time I showed the John Sayles film Matewan to a group of people. They found it bad because the Pinkerton thugs were portrayed as so evil. I got quite irritated because, first, the Pinkertons were evil, intimidating bastards. Nice guys didn't become union busting thugs. Second, I found the inability to accept pure characters, whether good or evil, sad. How much storytelling power do we lose without these kind of characters. I'm hardly calling for the return of 1950s Hollywood filmmaking here, and most of the characters in The Proposition were both written and acted in a believable manner. But can't it be a good thing for a movie, and in particular for a western, to have cut and dried characters?

3. For the most part though, the movie was pretty strong. Ray Winstone, Emily Watson, Guy Pearce, John Hurt, all great. Where is John Hurt these days anyway? What a fine actor. He is actually in a lot of movies, but most of them are bad. The last film I saw him in before this was his superbly turned role in Love and Death on Long Island way back in 1997. Nick Cave wrote a credible script. The cinematography was quite nice and the direction pretty solid. It's far from a great movie, in part for the reasons I described above, but I would give it fairly unqualified approval. It's at least better than most anything else out right now.