Article: Shots in the dark: what a gritty film about 19th-century Australia can tell us about imperialism today.(THE CRITICS GO AT IT--MOVIE COLUMN)(The Proposition)(Movie review)

Some movies set in the past allow us to tour history in the false belief that what is done and dusted can't harm us. But the best of them slam our faces into the horrors of the present. So it is with John Hillcoat's The Proposition, which shows the laughable attempts of an imperial police force to manage uncontrollable forces in the desert in the 1880s: Take it as an omen.

When hapless Irish teen Mikey Burns (Richard Wilson) is whipped nearly to death, the townsfolk of the bare-bones outback settlement where the punishment is inflicted look on dispassionately, but the flies gather with mounting enthusiasm. The scene, reminiscent of the scourging of Jesus in The ...

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