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Saw The Proposition the other night. It’s like Unforgiven without all the moral clarity. Danny Huston is quickly becoming one of my favorite actors and Guy Pearce is pretty typically reliable and John Hurt wallows in his character’s crapulence better than them all, but the real revelation here is Ray f’in Winstone. Holy shit. This guy takes a character (and the screenplay, by Nick Cave - more on that in a minute - deserves some credit for this as well) who starts out a despicable bad-ass and turns him into the one of the most sympathetic yet morally complex characters I’ve seen onscreen in a while.

This film is not for the faint of eye. It’s almost like what would happen if Cronenberg decided to direct a Western. On a somewhat related note, the narrative and presentation are very much like a Nick Cave song. Director John Hillcoat deserves credit for matching Cave’s aural style with a visual aesthetic. It’s pretty and gritty all at once. Cave’s music, not surprisingly, shows up in the film and is interesting in two ways. One, part of it is sort of spoken word poetry which for me usually comes off as pretentious (see Thin Red Line) but here works for some reason. Two, it’s not period. There’s a lot of distorted guitar but, again, it works for some reason (probably because it doesn’t sound like any period).
This, by the way, is the whole movie. The leads pointing guns at things.
So, if you feel like you can deal with heads getting blown or cut off and characters who, at best, are accessories to rape and genocide, go nuts.