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Proposition, The
EMAILPRINTFirst Look Pictures Releasing
Generally favorable reviews
Based on 31 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 36 votes
Read user comments
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Action | Crime | Drama | Foreign
Written by: Nick Cave
Directed by: John Hillcoat
Release Date:
Theatrical: May 5, 2006
DVD: September 19, 2006
Running Time: 104 minutes, Color
Origin: Australia / UK
Summary
RATING: R for strong grisly violence, and for language
Starring Tom Budge, Guy Pearce, Emily Watson, Ray Winstone, David Wenham, John Hurt, David Gulpilil, and Leah Purcell
Set against the harsh and unforgiving landscape of the 1880s Australian outback, The Proposition is a visually stunning tale of loyalty, revenge and the quest for justice in a land without rule. (First Look Pictures Releasing)
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Chicago Reader J.R. Jones
Directed by John Hillcoat, this Aussie feature perfectly re-creates the charbroiled landscapes and cruel psychodrama of the old Sergio Leone westerns, with John Hurt particularly fine as a raging old mountain goat.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
A movie you cannot turn away from; it is so pitiless and uncompromising, so filled with pathos and disregarded innocence, that it is a record of those things we pray to be delivered from.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum
A pitiless yet elegiac Australian Western as caked with beauty as it is with blood.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer Paula Nechak
In the end, this is a film about retribution and justice within unjust circumstances. Each character has a personal code of honor -- Arthur, Charlie and Capt. Stanley are all given their dignity -- and it's that code that sets the film apart.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten
Despite perpetual rumors of its demise as a genre, the Western is alive and well in the Australian outback.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington
It's a terrific, kinetic experience, and it's also a brilliant showcase for a crackerjack ensemble of great actors.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Ty Burr
A near-masterpiece of mood and menace, and one that deserves to be seen on the largest screen possible.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea
The Proposition, a beautiful, bloody meditation on justice, family, and the trap of retribution, is in every respect an artful addition to the canon of six-shooter morality tales.
Read Full Review >Baltimore Sun Chris Kaltenbach
By turns grisly and hallucinatory, The Proposition is one of those grand, mythic Westerns, full of wide-open spaces and dank little hellholes, detestable bad guys and virginal women, laconic lawmen and wary natives.
Read Full Review >Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
A visionary tale -- bleak but visionary all the same -- of a fragile civilizing impulse crushed by family loyalty and a lust for revenge in the vast Outback of the late 19th century.
Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir
It's the kind of movie we don't often encounter these days, and actually never did: A dramatically dense and morally complicated work, it's also a highly pictorial wide-screen entertainment with a dynamite cast, channeling the legacy of John Ford and Sam Peckinpah (and maybe Joseph Conrad too).
Read Full Review >Variety Richard Kuipers
Hillcoat and Cave have here found their most fertile ground yet for allegory-rich examinations of life and death in remote, pressure-cooker environments.
Read Full Review >Village Voice J. Hoberman
The climactic Christmas Day dinner of dreadful retribution is a terrifying prospect, but for anyone with a yen for our great lost genre, it's also some sort of gift.
Read Full Review >LA Weekly F. X. Feeney
The Proposition is a very hard and harsh movie, but it also has a hypnotic, lyrical velocity. As Arthur, Huston exudes dead charisma.
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer
The veteran rock musician Nick Cave wrote the screenplay and John Hillcoat directed, both somewhat in thrall to Sam Peckinpah. The bonds of family are the centerpiece of this highly uneven, hyperviolent film.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Maitland McDonagh
A sweat-slicked, near-abstract ballet of blood and sand.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Jack Mathews
Despite all the violence that ensues, The Proposition is a psychological Western more in the mold of Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven" than the John Ford films its stark cinematography resembles. It's about a good man, Stanley, who does bad things, and a bad man, Charlie, fighting his conscience.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Ann Hornaday
The Australian director John Hillcoat makes an audacious, unsettling American feature debut with The Proposition, a revisionist western that brings its own brand of sanguinary honesty to the genre.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Manohla Dargis
The cast of The Proposition is reason enough to see the film.
Read Full Review >The New Yorker Anthony Lane
It is one of those movies--Antonioni's "Red Desert" being the most flagrant example--that spend so much time brimming with moral and political suggestion that they almost forget to tell us what's actually going on.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy
There is life to The Proposition, though, and brutal, pitiless life it is. If it breathed more (and if Huston had spoken less), it might have been remarkable. As it is, it's monotonous, grim and uneven.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen
Huston's performance has a keen edge to it, as do those of the other actors, yet everyone suffers from the same problem -- they're not playing knowable characters so much as thematic points on the broad spectrum of violence.
Read Full Review >Premiere Ethan Alter
The Proposition can be appreciated as a strong technical exercise, but it fails to resonate on any deeper level.
Read Full Review >The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann
Despite the pictorial riches, despite the firm performances by Ray Winstone as the captain and Guy Pearce as Charlie Burns, despite the miraculous John Hurt in an eccentric role that was put in just for spice, The Proposition is hollow.
Read Full Review >Dallas Observer Rob Nelson
Conversation is as meaningless as anything else in this barbarist take on "The Searchers."
Read Full Review >New York Post Kyle Smith
The quality of the acting, Cave's hellfire score and the heavy atmospherics of the directing merely dress up a cliché: Violence leads to more violence.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Noel Murray
The sketchily symbolic characters and flat plot just frame an atmosphere of sticky heat and Biblical reckoning.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 8.3 (out of 10) based on 36 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
John P gave it a4:
Wow, what a waste of time. Half the movie (every 10 minutes to be exact) is the tedious exercise of watching Emily Watson's character mope her way through every scene; the look on her face a mix between whether she wants to cry or needs to use the bathroom. Way to drag a seemingly decent to a grinding trot. In Unforgiven, did Little Bill need some bland-wife character study around spending half the movie comatose and depressed in order to tell us absolutely nothing about Little Bill? No, but that's what's going on here with Ray Winstone. Enough Pulp Fiction-esque, "soul searching" monolouges from the characters to fulfill every college screenwriting nerd's wet dream. Another overrated artsy movie; watch The Long Riders instead if you want tormented outlaw brothers. Ugh. Where's the line to get my 2 hours back?
Simon gave it a1:
One of the most achingly slow and boring films i've sen in a long time, beautifully shot, but cold have been told in 30 mins!
Alex P gave it a10:
Better, more relevant and more real than all the trigger happy, gunslinging, sheriff hero excuses for a western film out there. If you like pistol duels at high noon try watching this to see what a real western with real characters should be like.
John B. gave it a9:
It took me a several times watching this movie, but I finally understand it. The Proposition is an amazing work of art that brings to attention the harshness of the land and the way it affected the lives of so many. In a land without law or justice, grand sweeping cinematic visuals paint a landscape captured perfectly. What makes The Proposition truly unique is the way motives clash and the plot weaves such a fascinating turn of events. You almost wish the characters could be more decisive in their actions but by contemplating things, we are allowed to fully understand the predicament each character faces. The Proposition almost plays out like a modern day Shakespearean tragedy. While I can see how this movie could be overwhelming at first, it deserves to be treated more like a work of art being viewed multiple times to fully grasp what is presented here.
Dan C. gave it an8:
An extremely good film with a harsh, unrelenting take on violence and the way it consumed good and bad people alike. It makes a very powerful impression.
Chad S. gave it an8:
"The Proposition" has one helluva flogging scene. As a meditation on violence, this one particular moment bests anything in Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven". Up to this point, there was some concern on my part that the constant narrative shifts away from Charlie's journey might be hurting the film. And it does so in one important aspect; reaching his brothers' hideout doesn't seem much of an arduous undertaking, although the distance must be considerable. All that time compression hurts that epic feel that a film like Nicholas Roeg's "Walkabout" has. As Charlie (Guy Pearce) searches for his brothers to carry out some vigilante justice; back home, Martha (Emily Watson) discovers that she doesn't have the stomach for an "eye-for-an-eye, and tooth-for-a-tooth" way of doing things. The story of the sheriff and his wife is needed to show that even an outback needs the law. "The Proposition" is a beautiful, and brutal film.
Tim R gave it a5:
You know, the cinematography was impressive, the cast was well placed, and the setting was very tangible. Ray Winstone as Captain Stanley was, without question, the best part of this film ... his performance and delivery were continually intriguing. This is not to side step the other fine performances, mainly by Guy and Emily. My scoring is mostly due to distaste of the subject matter...it was VERY harsh, and very real in how it delivered the evil and disgusting side of sinful man. [***SPOILERS***] Perhaps I should rate it higher than, because it did such a “good job” of making me almost ill trying to take it all in, especially when half the scenes leave your mind still wondering, "what else happened. How did they do that evil thing. what might it look like..." etc. More of a western-style horror to me. “Tombstone”, this is my golden standard for a western. This movie adds nothing good to the imagination or spirit.
