Bad Seed makes good proposition

The setting is the Australian outback circa 1880. A raggedy-looking posse has an equally scruffy-looking band of outlaws surrounded. After a hellishly clangorous shoot-out, the outlaws surrender.

And the leader of the posse, one Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone), makes the gravest of outlaws, the wraithlike Charlie Burns (Guy Pearce) a perversely irresistible offer—he and his younger brother can avoid execution and assorted other punishments if he consents to track down his even more notorious older brother, Arthur Burns (Danny Huston).

The grimly compelling action drama that ensues from Stanley’s proposition is partly predictable. The cruel ferocity of this opening scene feels like something out of a particularly inspired sort of spaghetti western, and the film makes good on that aspect of its opening promises—and threats—to the audience. The overall results are not easy to categorize, and that in some ways adds crucially to the interest.

The screenplay, written by Nick Cave (best known for his musical project The Bad Seeds, but also a published novelist), has a certain brilliance just in the combination of elements, generic and otherwise, that it puts into play.

It’s a western, an odd allegory, a twisted morality play, a savage slice of Australian history and culture, a screed against racism and imperialism, an offshoot of the conflicts of the English and the Irish, and more. But the chief payoff for all that is limited to the impressive aura that the film successfully generates for itself.

The film’s most conclusive accomplishments emerge through a handful of oddly intriguing characters—and the actors who play them. (Among other things, The Proposition offers an unusually interesting study in motion picture characterizations as highly variable combinations of script, direction, performance and sheer screen presence. The characters are written as grotesque caricatures. And it seems, to the credit of director John Hillcoat and his cast, that they have been able to keep a few shards of human goodness alive amidst so much repellent and destructive behavior.)

Winstone and Huston are especially striking here, while Pearce does yeoman service as the mysteriously intense character who is the linking factor among the various stories, as well as the abiding figure closest to the film’s darkly divided heart.

John Hurt brings devilish flair to the role of a maliciously eloquent bounty hunter named Jellon Lamb, and Emily Watson bears up bravely as Stanley’s wife, a not-so-fragile flower of Victorian idealism whose cloistered existence is inevitably disrupted by the violent contradictions in her husband’s work, including his efforts to protect her. The film’s distinctively eclectic musical soundtrack is also by Cave.