Western Matters
Down In the Valley
Directed by David Jacobson
I'm not convinced that writer-director David Jacobson asked those questions before shooting Down in the Valley, an ambitious indie drama which starts out quirky and strong, then quickly succumbs to Film School Disease and waves its various inspirations in your face like flash cards.
Jacobson, who directed the intriguing (but unfortunately, still derivative) Dahmer, has ambition and chops but not much sense. And this movie's agenda is as cliched as Harlan Carruthers' "young-country hat act" clothes.
The movie starts out unpredictably, but its depiction of the misbegotten affair between Stetson-wearing drifter Harlan Carruthers (Edward Norton) and a suburban Lolita named Tobe (Evan Rachel Wood) rings a lot of too-familiar notes, cribbed mainly from Badlands, Terrence Malick's debut-a love-struck, criminals-on-the-run film-whose imitators are so numerous that they could fill up a whole cable channel.
Harlan, a drawling, horseback riding, hunky goofball, seems more a literary conceit than a credible human being. Soon enough, any goodwill generated by Norton's engaging performance and the film's spectacular and appropriate widescreen vistas vanishes, and the film reveals itself as all footnotes and no text. The first half is an oddball comedy, the second an increasingly grim and pretentious psychological drama that seems to exist mainly to give Norton a pretext to indulge the familiar actor-fantasy of doing his own Travis Bickle.
Taxi Driver was also a harmonic convergence of movie references, but it had a point and a pulse because it plugged into then-contemporary fears of society breakdown, political collapse and cancerous moral decay. Travis Bickle wasn't just an emblem or an answer; he was a flesh-and-blood person whose contradictory personality was both sociologically resonant and psychologically credible. And Scorsese and Paul Schrader's classic was not merely a movie about other movies, but a movie about life that just happened to be flamboyantly film-literate.
The latter description also fits the Australian western The Proposition, the second collaboration between director John Hillcoat and soundtrack composer/screenwriter Nick Cave, who clearly wrote this film in a murder-ballad mood.
Guy Pearce plays Charlie Burns, one of three brothers who ride with the outback-terrorizing Burns gang circa 1880. In the film's opening sequence, he falls into the clutches of a local sheriff named Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone), who makes the titular offer: if Charlie avenges a Burns gang rape/massacre by hunting down and killing his own brother, psycho gang leader Arthur (Danny Huston), then Stanley won't execute Charlie's imprisoned younger brother, Mike (Richard Wilson), a mental incompetent who's not really responsible for the brothers' crimes.
This is a plot straight out of a Peckinpah film or a Sergio Leone spaghetti western, but while the film's CinemaScope compositions repeatedly invoke both directors, homage is near the bottom of Hillcoat's list of things to do. This is not a film about westerns, but simply a western, one that revives the form for a couple of hours instead of embalming it.
Its details are specific to Cave's chosen time and place; you can practically smell the boozy sweat and feel the desert heat. And in nearly every scene, the actors compete for screen time against a biblical plague of horseflies. But its social predicaments are, unfortunately, timeless.
Stanley wants to smash the Burns gang to avenge the rape of a local woman who was friends with his wife (Emily Watson). Yet the mostly-English émigrés are not remotely interested in justice for the Irish-descended Burns gang (the Irish are described as blacks turned inside-out) and view the dark-skinned aboriginals as dogs who walk upright. In older westerns, the "man's-gotta-do-what-a-man's-gotta-do" myth was often invoked for the greater good of society-an invocation of a higher law superseding whatever happened to be on the books. But Hillcoat and Cave explode that myth, insisting instead that in too many situations, justice is just another word for control.
Controversial Down Under for its blunt nastiness, the film has been repeatedly (and often unfavorably) compared to Sam Peckinpah's work. But while Hillcoat's direction lacks Peckinpah's splendidly restless energy, it achieves a feat that often eluded the master: It's graphically violent, often horrendously so, yet it's never, ever superficially exciting.
With certain exceptions, the violence of The Proposition often occurs below or beyond the frame line, or is glimpsed only fleetingly. Yet the before-and-after contrast, combined with reaction shots of horrified onlookers, tells you everything you needed to know. Hillcoat isn't pretending to be repulsed by the evil men do to each other; he truly is repulsed. That revulsion makes The Proposition not just a powerful film, but an honest one.