Brilliant and bloody

It is difficult to remember a more iconically inclined film than John Hillcoat's Australian western. Almost every image is carefully calculated, we are offered a dozen glorious sunsets, and sweaty faces are held in close-up to emphasise The Proposition's emotional force.

It is bloodily violent, Peckinpah-style myth-making, tinged with a smidgeon of romantic longing. But despite veering at times towards a slightly heavyhanded romanticism, this tough and cynical approximation of Australia's birth pangs in the late 19th century, written by Nick Cave, is undeniably impressive.

And the acting from a fine cast can hardly be faulted. Ray Winstone is particularly good as Captain Stanley, a British officer determined to bring order to a hopelessly disordered land. He is infuriated by a vicious trio of bushranging brothers who have robbed and raped a family of settlers in a small outback town.

Stanley manages to capture two of the brothers and offers Charlie (Guy Pearce), the middle one, the proposition of the title. The youngest (Richard Wilson) will escape hanging if Charlie will go into the outback and kill his elder sibling Arthur (Danny Huston), whom Stanley considers the natural born killer of the trio.

The trouble is that David Wenham's British town boss (the only caricature in the film) wants the law to take its course without such a bargain, and orders the youngest brother to be whipped. The punishment almost kills him and may remind some of the flogging in Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ.

Meanwhile, a drunken bounty hunter (John Hurt) waits his chance to scupper everyone's plans. Stanley is a man you instantly suspect of being as psychotic as the brothers; he treats his respectable wife (Emily Watson) as if she were made of rare china but is somehow unable to have a decent emotional relationship with her.

Director Hillcoat makes the brothers as sympathetic as Stanley, though they are clearly villains and he is fundamentally a decent man. Winstone's capacity to show us a character just as chilling as they are is central to The Proposition's success.

The quieter passages between Stanley and his wife are among the best in a movie that is otherwise almost nihilist in its insistence that no one must be trusted, least of all the British, and that life at that time was nasty, brutish and probably short.

No one could ask for any of it to look better, thanks to the burnished cinematography of Benoít Delhomme and the production design of Chris Kennedy, who makes Australia seem the absolute end of the Earth. Nor to sound better, since Cave and Warren Ellis's music, mixing the traditional and the modern, feels totally appropriate.

There is a steely strength about Hillcoat's direction which was heralded by Ghost of the Civil Dead, his remarkable first feature. If there are times when his second tips over into the portentous, there is no question that it is also a pretty remarkable achievement.

The Proposition
Cert: 18