"You want me to kill me brother," Charlie Burns responds with grim resignation. Under normal circumstances, Charlie and his younger brother, Mikey, would just be hanged. But here in the Mythical Western, Charlie has been given a quest. If he will kill his older brother, Arthur, he will save himself and Mikey from the gallows. He has until Christmas, nine days away. In the Australian outback, it's also roughly the temperature of hell.
Charlie is played by Guy Pearce as the closest thing this film has to a moral center, though the creatures who crawl through this tale mostly trade in shades of evil. Charlie and Mikey were members of the ruthless Burns gang, wanted most notoriously for the rape and murder of the Hopkins family. What would possess Captain Stanley (Winstone) to strike this devil's deal with such an outlaw? Maybe it's the heat.
With its blood-soaked, sun-baked canvas, The Proposition will certainly draw comparisons to the films of Sam Peckinpah. If the point of The Wild Bunch was to remind us that violence is real, this revisionist entry seems content merely to point out that violence happens. A lot.
Helping to distract us from the pointless narrative is a transcendent cast and some striking cinematography. John Hurt appears as a scalawag bounty hunter, and David Wenham is Stanley's sadistic, snobbish superior. At the center is the triangle of brothers Charlie and Arthur, and Captain Stanley. Arthur (Danny Huston, son of John) is clearly the catalyst for his gang's brutality. He lives deep in the wilderness and babbles on about the importance of family, but he cares for humanity about as much as Charles Manson.
The screenplay (as well as the music) is courtesy of Nick Cave, he of The Bad Seeds fame. This is the same guy whose take on She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not involved ripping the wings off of flies instead of flower petals. This time the flies get the last laugh, swarming over living and dead bodies alike. They realize there's no difference.