The Proposition (2005)

It does not do this Australian film justice to praise it as a “must-see film,” or with some other superlative marketing remark; such comments are bound to skew audience expectation. Nonetheless, “The Proposition” is an unusual approach to the western genre as the lead characters are indeed outsiders who never fit in to a community and end up awash, riding into an open-ended terrain. Though I would consider Guy Pearce’s character the protagonist in the plot about liberating an innocent brother and Ray Winstone’s policeman as a major character, perhaps a counterpoint, the film stays at a Brechtian distance. This is not a character-driven western in a conventional sense; the characters' psychology is of little significance and the action remains always external. This also means that the entire film transcends the individual characters in favor of a metaphor for a place, a sweltering & viscerally brutal “fresh hell.” The real lead character here is a continent; the untamed impression of Australia.