The Proposition
Starring: Ray Winstone, Guy Pearce, Emily Watson, Danny Huston
Director: John Hillcoat
The film: It's remarkable, given the kind of treatment handed out to North America's 'wild west' over the years, that filmmakers in Australia haven't followed suit. In recent years, the output from Down Under has largely concerned itself with quirky takes of suburbia. And the nation's past has - for the most part - been forgotten.
But with Phillip Noyce's superb Rabbit Proof Fence (2002) and now this, perhaps the time has come for the Australian industry to invest once again in films that had it at the forefront of world cinema in the late 1970s and early 80s.
Like Fred Schepisi's gripping The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith (1978), The Proposition gives a different slant to what might have been going on as Australia was forged as a nation. It's a tale drenched in violence - a violence that seems so commonplace as to appear almost natural. Given the manner in which the brutal Outback is captured, that's hardly surprising.
Written by expat musician Nick Cave - who rejoins director John Hillcoat 18 years after they made the gritty prison drama Ghosts ... of the Civil Dead - The Proposition follows a young outlaw (Guy Pearce, below left with John Hurt) who is given the task of the title by an English policeman (Ray Winstone) determined to tame his new land - and its people. By Christmas, the outlaw must kill or offer up his other wayward brother - a sadistic killer on the run - or the copper will hang their youngest sibling.