The Proposition (2005)
The Proposition (2005) — So I recently finished reading The Road and read that John Hillcoat directed the forthcoming film adaptation so I therefore opted to revisit Hillcoat’s previous film, which I saw a couple years ago and purchased on Blu Ray a few months ago (at a very reasonable price, as far as Blu Ray discs go). There is a certain pacing common to Australian films I’ve seen. It doesn’t really play to American sensibilities but for meditative films like this one it really works. Plus it makes the violence all the more brutal when it erupts, and oh does it erupt in this. Deconstructionist westerns have become a particularly heady subgenre of the larger Western genre (sidenote: it is still a Western if it doesn’t take place in the United States?). As rough as the “Wild West” of the United States is, our own struggles with westward expansion is nothing compared to that of the Australian continent, vast areas of which are still uninhabitable to what we think of as “civilization.” I think that’s really the thing about this movie. It asks if you really can “civilize” a place, and if you can, what exactly makes us qualified to do the “civilizing?” There seems to be very little civilized about the time and place that The Proposition depicts.
Persistence of Vision 