Kayleigh Donaldson
This year, we’ll once again shine a light on unconventional Christmas movies that we feel are worth putting into your holiday viewing rotation. Follow along here.
It’s become something of a seasonal tradition for film lovers to try and find the ultimate alternative festive movie. As we prepare for yet another argument about whether or not Die Hard is really a Christmas movie, many cineastes have delved deeper into the canon for a December-set narrative that could meet the basic requirements of a Christmas film and offer an artsier alternative to yet another screening of It’s a Wonderful Life or Elf. The joke, that such works are as antithetical to the holiday as heatwaves are to winter, is half the point. In the hotly competitive subgenre of the darkest Christmas films ever made, standing bloodily over the likes of Morvern Callar and American Psycho, is a Western that would leave even the toughest of stomachs churning.
Directed by John Hillcoat and written by Nick Cave (who also provided the score with regular collaborator Warren Ellis), 2005’s The Proposition is both a striking Western and a stab through the heart of that genre’s oft-crooked mythologizing. Set in Australia in the 1880s, it follows Charlie Burns (Guy Pearce), an outlaw who is forced to make a deal with lawmaker Captain Morris Stanley (Ray Winstone). Charlie must locate his sadistic older brother Arthur (Danny Huston), leader of the Burns gang, and kill him in nine days. If he doesn’t, the Captain will hang their mentally disabled brother Mike (Richard Wilson).
Riding in search of Arthur, Charlie is forced to confront the obscene violence inflicted upon the land that people like him have begun to colonize. The local Aboriginal people have been exploited and murdered en masse by the white settlers. Captain Stanley is part of a concerted effort to “civilize” this new land, which mostly means endless slaughter and genocide. Charlie’s old gang are no innocents in this game, as he stumbles across the burning remains of a home destroyed by the Burns gang. Rape is as much a tool of destruction and colonialism as the gun, and no woman is safe from it. It’s ceaseless to the point of tedious, but never any less shocking. In one scene, a character is sentenced to a hundred lashes for a crime he didn’t commit, and the ensuing punishment is horrific, but even the bloodthirsty spectators get bored by the sheer overkill of such a display. For the settlers, the hell they’ve created is one that is non-discriminating in its wrath, but it’s still the marginalized who suffer the most.
The anti-Western cinematic genre, a consciously critical approach to the romantic ideas of Manifest Destiny and John Wayne, is almost as old as the classic Western. Placing that into the context of Australian history, as well as its own cinema, offers something that makes all too much sense. The Outback is already the perfect location for such a story, so baking hot and inescapable in its endless sand and rocks. Across every cave, there is another skeleton to be found, literal or otherwise. Hillcoat borrows heavily from Peckinpah with his view of a world painted red with bloodshed but his cultural lens is uniquely Australian. The subjugation of the Aboriginal population was a concerted effort to erase them from existence, and it was one that many settlers did with glee. Some were more ambivalent, like our mostly silent “hero” Charlie, but still they participated. None of the white characters learn any lessons by the film’s end. They don’t have dramatic emotional arcs or come-to-Jesus moments as they confront the system they’ve found themselves trapped by; those who aren’t dead are traumatized but not regretful enough to change their ways. As history showed, they continued to spill blood.
The pure farce of colonialism is at the forefront of Hillcoat and Cave’s vision. It’s effective, yes, but no less shoddy in its theatricalities. Captain Stanley is told to bring order and decency to the desert, a task he fulfills while dressed to the nines in a heavy coat that leaves him sweating like a sinner in church. His wife Martha (Emily Watson), isolated from her old life and too afraid to venture far from their home, tries to recreate an English Christmas, complete patches of artificial snow. It offers an unforgiving contrast, between the promise of Christmas’s celebration of goodwill to all men and the actions of the Christians to build a so-called nation. “I will civilize this place,” declares one settler. In practice, that means killing Indigenous people who don’t fit their definition of such a nonsense term. Such is how a country is made.
Amid this massacre, the Captain and his wife sit down to celebrate Christmas. Their tree, imported from halfway around the world, glistens with decorations. The turkey dinner looks delicious. But it’s all as fake as the snow that lines the red dusty ground. The sheen of decorum and festive cheer is a poor disguise for the shriveled black heart at the center of The Proposition and the history it depicts. It might not make for the happiest movie experience this December, but it’d certainly be the most honest.
“The Proposition” is streaming on Amazon Prime, Peacock, Kanopy, and several ad-based services.
