Revisions and Propositions

Well, I'm still hard at work editing "The Eternal Movie," (the title seems especially apt as it feels like I've been working on it for freakin' ever.) Props must be given to my good friend Angie for her insightful reading. She very properly castigated me for my unfortunate tendency towards excessive, bloated verbosity, including my misguidedly and madly heedless use of crazily proliferate adverbs, not to mention my redundant, repetitive, superfluous and unnecessary wordiness; a habit, as it were, of endlessly explaining with massive amounts of explication and exposition, with sentences that run on and on and on, never seeming to end.

I really don't know what she's talking about.

Seriously, though, it was great advice. Gave some "new eyes" to look at the thing during the editing process. She also had a lot to say about the structure, ways to turn it from a good story into a great one by removing the top-heavy set-up and starting with the action. Sadly, this would require me to tear the whole thing apart and start from scratch and I'm frankly sick of looking at the thing. So, it will go to the publishers with the structure intact, just about 500 words lighter.

It's a strange feeling paring down a story for submission to a five-cents-per-word publication. Sorta like throwing nickels in the trash. Oh, well. I'm feeling even more confident about the story than before. I just can't wait to be finished with it.

I saw a good movie recently. (That's a rare enough occurrence to warrant a blog entry.) I became interested in seeing "The Proposition" when I heard the screenplay was written by Nick Cave. Now, there are a lot of musical artists whose careers follow the familiar arc of early brilliance, peaking at around their third album or so, followed many years of "milking it." Then there are the elite few like Tom Waits, PJ Harvey and Nick Cave, who unbelievably just keep getting better.

I was curious to see if his brilliance extended into this other medium. (He's also published a couple novels, though I haven't read them.) I'm not sure what I was expecting. Maybe a typical rock star vanity project, like Perry Ferrel's "Gift" or Axl Rose's disastrous "Portrait of the Obnoxious Egotist as a Self-Absorbed Young Heroin Addict." What I got instead was a complex, literate and very bloody western.

The nineteenth-century Australian outback has many parallels to the mythical American West of the same period but, based on this movie at least, was an even bleaker, more desolate and violent landscape. Everything is coated with dust and flies. ("The Proposition" has to set some kind of record for most flies in a movie. The record for most flies ON a movie was of course set by "The Life of David Gale.") The sky is a bleached, baking white. The outlaws are violent men. So are the police. So are the aborigines.
The "Proposition" of the title comes when Capt. Stanley (Ray Winstone,) the man charged with imposing some semblance of civilization upon this hellhole, manages to capture two of the three outlaw Burns brothers. He makes a deal with with middle brother, Charlie (Guy Pearce.) Find and kill his eldest brother, Arthur (Danny Houston- son of John) to save the life of the younger brother Mikey, who is scheduled to hang (on Christmas day!) What follows is an unforgiving tale of loyalty and betrayal.

The violence is extreme, but completely appropriate and morally ambiguous. The scene where the young, simple-minded Mikey (a killer and a rapist) is flogged with a hundred lashes is as hard to watch as anything in "The Passion of the Christ" or Mel Gibson's arrest video. (Great close-up of blood being literally wrung from the leather whip.)

In the center of all this ugliness, though, is the surprisingly tender and respectful relationship between Captain Stanley and his wife Martha (Emily Watson.) Both characters are portrayed with depth and complexity. Cpt. Stanley is a man whose decency is being eroded by his position and the land he has come to. Martha's insistence upon English-ness and her notions of justice seem like naivite until they are eventually shattered.

Adding yet another layer of complexity is the theme of racism. The aborigines are of course victims of casual, institutionalized hatred. More surprisingly, the Irish (including the Burns brothers) are referred to "niggers turned inside out."

This was a really great movie, one that lingers in the mind for days after seeing it. If it were the type of movie that didn't scare Oscar voters shitless, it would be deserving of multiple honors. Nick Cave's script and the score which he contributed to are both poetic and minimalistic. The acting is great all around. Especially Ray Winstone and Emily Watson (for her bathtub monologue alone.) Danny Houston's Arthur Burns and John Hurt's bounty hunter Jellon Lamb compete for the title of most morally void and yet poetically well-spoken character in recent film history. The cinematography, too, is exceptional, for finding stark beauty among all the ugliness. The scene where the two older brothers sit on a rocky ledge and watch the sunset is nothing short of miraculous.

So- "The Proposition." I only get to see one or two movies a month nowadays (not counting kid-vid,) so I'm grateful for substantial fare like this. It might be hard to watch, but I guarantee it's worth it.