'The Proposition': Bullets and blood in an outlaw Outback

In the brutal Australian western "The Proposition," Guy Pearce looks like he's been dipped in grease and rolled in dirt, a scrawny piece of meat ready for the fryer. Bedraggled, with a murderous glare, Pearce's outlaw Charlie Burns has been given a task not unlike Captain Willard's in "Apocalypse Now": to tromp into the wilderness and bring back a loosed psychopath. But the Kurtz whom Burns must capture is his own brother Arthur, who faces mighty rough justice upon his return.

"I aim to hurt him," grumbles local head of police Captain Stanley (the great lion, Ray Winstone), who has offered Charlie a proposition: In exchange for Arthur, he will save the neck of Charlie and his younger brother, the dim and terrified Mikey (Richard Wilson, all hideous shrieks and tears).

First Look Pictures 'The Proposition' 4 out of 5 stars The verdict: Stark realism, even acting make for a winning "Proposition." Director: John Hillcoat Starring: Guy Pearce, Emily Watson, John Hurt, Ray Winstone, David Wenham Run time: 104 minutes Release date: May 5, 2006 Rating: R for strong grisly violence, and for language. See showtimes On the web Official movie site View the trailer    Trailers require Quicktime Rate 'The Proposition'   Go see it   Make it a matinee   Wait to rent   Don't bother Voter Limit: Once per Hour View Poll Results

Charlie reluctantly agrees. He's given a gun, a horse and nine days to catch Arthur. It's a gamble. If Charlie simply gallops off to freedom, reteaming with Arthur for more misdeeds, then Stanley's head will roll.

It's the 1880s in the Outback's version of the Wild West. The Burns brothers are ruthless scofflaws, guilty of massacring a popular local family. They raped and murdered a pregnant woman and killed her unborn child, a fact the story uses as a stubborn refrain to drive home the Burns' savagery. To Stanley, Arthur is the worst of the bunch, the fraternal gang's maniacal linchpin. He must be snuffed.

The film's opening credits, a slide show of corpses and funerals, caution that we're embarking on a journey of suffering and death. Director John Hillcoat and screenwriter Nick Cave — the brooding troubadour, who also performs the haunting minimalist score — take cues from the gore-streaked cowboy novels of Cormac McCarthy and the choking grime of Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns. The grisly stench of Sam Peckinpah is also heavy, but unlike Hillcoat, Peckinpah stuck to spurting blood squibs. Hillcoat goes for visceral realism.

"The Proposition" almost revels in its sickening brutality and glib sadism, yet it feels true and unflinching, not exploitative. It's of a piece with the hardscrabble existence of a civilization trying to bloom from the baked earth of the Australian desert. This is a place of immigrants, largely English, Irish and Chinese, as well as subjugated Aborigines, who are treated no better than African Americans at this historical period. Racial antipathies fuel the frustrations of creating a new world in such hellish desolation.

The Western has always grasped for the barbed-wire tangle of legend, myth and Greek tragedy, a skein of archetypes unfurling in the dusty nothingness of new frontiers. "The Proposition" claims an unlikely hero in Charlie, and his classical journey sets off a domino trail of loyalty, betrayal and revenge, with an added Cain and Abel dimension. Charlie travels alone, shown often as a paltry figure among swallowing expanses, and his one major encounter before finding Arthur and his pals has the whiff of metaphor. Who is this sickly harbinger of death, played with hammy abandon by a spectacular, poetry-spewing John Hurt? He has much to say, and teach.

Filled with dreadful beauty, the story is streamlined and pointed like myth, simple and fiercely direct. It pricks at primeval moral questions and lets them ooze without easy remedy. Pathos is spread among the good and the bad, and near the climax, you might feel queasy rooting for the bloody Burns brothers. Leave it to dastardly Arthur to bring us to our senses.

Place and texture are the movie's great triumphs, populated by uniformly exact performances. Pearce is as lean and mean as his physique. A master of simmering self-possession, Winstone is enormously sympathetic as a man burdened by his choice and touchingly protective of his wife (a recessive Emily Watson). They're surrounded by a scabby gallery of characters whose rotten teeth, weasely greed and overall filth make them suitable additions to "The Road Warrior," another slice of bleakly exhilarating Aussie cinema.

If "The Proposition" and Tommy Lee Jones' recent "Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada" herald the emergence of the dirty and violent neo-western, then viewers are in for some tough viewing. These pictures don't play nice. They're mean like junkyard curs, wandering parched badlands, where justice is swift and nasty, and redemption is a bad, bloody joke.