Not Coming to a Theater Near You

The Proposition / Australia / U.K. / 2005

The brutal ugliness and violence of human behaviour finds an apt enough counterpart here in the cruel pitilessness of the Australian outback, but by the time The Proposition reaches its climax, you wonder what the point is in this display of unredeeming violence. There’s no sign that the filmmakers know themselves. What we’re left with is just the kind of indulgence in Gothic luridness that you get in scriptwriter Nick Cave’s own worst songs. This is all something of a pity as, early on, the film goes off in a fascinating and surprising direction with the Ray Winstone character, the captain with the civilising mission who sets wife Emily Watson up in a Fordian garden in the desert — this ends up the strongest and most rewarding aspect to a very muddled film.

by Ian Johnston | Source: First Look DVD
09 Oct 2007 1:26 PM | Comments (1)

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1. leo / 9 October 2007 / 11:01 AM / URL

   Sad as I am to admit it, your reaction was very much like my own. And this is a great shame, because the setting and mood of the film is quite excellent. It just never amounts to much of anything, and by the end of the film I began hoping — as I almost never do nowadays — that it would last another hour or so, just to give us a little more substance.

   Still John Hillcoat’s work here is admirable (he’s apparently been pegged to direct an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road), and even if the script doesn’t deliver, it nonetheless serves to enrich Nick Cave’s own character: that of an uncommonly gloomy bastard.