(Press Release) THE PROPOSITION, the majestic and bold new film written by music icon Nick Cave (with a score by Cave and longtime collaborator / Dirty Three frontman Warren Ellis available on Mute Records) opens in New York and Los Angeles Friday May 5th. Select cities to follow:Friday May 5th NY @ The Angelika Film Center, AMC Empire 25 Lincoln Square
LA @The Nu Art, 11272 Santa Monica Boulevard
Friday May 19th
Chicago @ Music Box Theater
Friday May 26th
Atlanta @ Midtown
Boston @ Kendall Square
Dallas @ The Magnolia
CD @ Landmark Bethesda
Houston @ The Angelika
Minneapolis @ The Lagoon
Philadelphia @ The Ritz
Portland @ Regal Fox
San Diego @ The Ken
San Francisco @ The Lumiere
More TBA
Directed by John Hilcoat, THE PROPOSITION is a visually stunning tale of loyalty, betrayal, and retribution set in Australia's Outback frontier in the 1880's. The soundtrack for the film, out now on Mute Records, incorporates soft chamber pieces, ghostly moodscapes and whispered laments. Story and music are closely intertwined and these 16 tracks are as starkly beautiful as the landscape of the film. "I always heard it musically, and I guess it's written rhythmically as well" Cave explains, "There are moments of intense violence and there are also moments of long, lyrical, quiet sadness."
THE PROPOSITION features explosive performances by Guy Pearce (MEMENTO), Ray Winstone (SEXY BEAST), Danny Huston (THE CONSTANT GARDENER), John Hurt (ELEPHANT MAN), and Emily Watson (BREAKING THE WAVES). The film will open on Friday, May 5 in New York at the Angelika Film Center and AMC Empire 25, and in Los Angeles, with a national roll-out to follow.
Charlie Burns (Guy Pearce) is a renegade living in Australia's lawless frontier who, along with his two brothers, is wanted for a grisly murder. After being captured by local law enforcer Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone), he is presented with an impossible proposition: the only way to save his younger brother Mikey (Richard Wilson) from the gallows is to track down and kill his psychotic older brother Arthur (Danny Huston), who Stanley believes to be the ringleader in the violence. Meanwhile, Captain Stanley has other problems with which to contend. Having given up their comfortable life in England, he is desperate to shield his luminous wife Martha (Emily Watson) from the brutalities of their new surroundings. However, his attempts at "civilizing" the lawless émigrés and renegade Aborigines only makes matters worse. An uneasy sense of foreboding grows as events close in and each character faces a punishing moral dilemma that leads inexorably to a devastating climax.
Though THE PROPOSITION evokes, in iconography and scope, the great American western, Cave and Hillcoat's vision of nineteenth century Australia is wilder than anything ever imagined out west. Ex-cons, bounty hunters, homicidal brutes, sadistic Brits and vengeful natives battle over an untamed land swarming with flies and scorched by an unrelenting sun. As emotionally engaging as it is shockingly, authentically violent, and as breathtakingly beautiful as it is bleak, THE PROPOSITION is riveting, visceral cinema, visualized and acted with brio and punctuated by Cave and Ellis's unmistakably haunting score.
