» The Proposition

I’m not a film critic. Movements are my specialty.

But I can’t help commenting on a film I saw recently. The Proposition.

Don’t rush out and see it unless you have a stomach for violence and a heart that can cope with despair.

Set in the Australian outback in the 1880s, it tells the story of the Burns brother’s gang. Brothers Charlie and the young Mikey are captured after a shootout with police. Charlie is offered a proposition. Mikey will hang on Christmas Day, unless he finds and kills his older (psychotic) brother Arthur, the leader of the gang.

Martin Flanagan in the Age comments: “The film ends on a note of cosmic aloneness and the question, ‘What are you going to do next?’ This is art for our time. It summons huge moral forces and then arrives at something only a fraction short of chaos. It gains its power by suggesting highly serious themes which it then fails to deliver on in any large or meaningful way, leaving us instead with images of chaotic violence in a harshly beautiful land.”

I can’t help thinking—this is the best that our culture has to offer and it’s hopelessly inadequate. Powerful and compelling cinema proclaiming the “gospel” of an empty universe. The barbarians are at the gate.