The Proposition (2005)

Synopsis: In nineteenth-century Australia, a sheriff captures two outlaw brothers suspected of being involved in a recent crime of rape and murder. They used to be part of a gang with another brother and some other men, but of late they had been living apart from the gang. The sheriff makes a proposition to the eldest of the captured brothers: he will set him and his younger brother free if he brings him his other brother, who lives in a hideout in the mountains; in the meantime, he will keep the youngest one in jail.

Appraisal: Long, static scenes with characters contemplating the unfathomable, alternated with sudden bursts of violence, and all that woven together by a flimsy plot, which echoes some elements from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, or, if one prefers, its more popular cinematic version Apocalypse Now (1979); in all these works, there is a savage country and a white man obsessed with "civilizing" it; there is also a man in search of another who has reputedly become a little unhinged (in this one, he "howls at the moon"). Here, however, the characters are underdeveloped and uninteresting, and the plot follows a linear and quite predictable path; the point of it all seems to be a comic-book aestheticism, as sterile as it is wearisome on the eye.

Rating: 41