When That Rough God Goes Riding: Greil Marcus on the many mysteries, missteps, and pants of Van Morrison

Perhaps the greatest records—the ones that, to borrow Greil Marcus’ standard, we carry to our graves—are those that seize us upon our first encounter, yield their real treasures only gradually, and somehow retain their mysteries even after we’ve internalized their every strum, tickle, and intake of breath. Marcus claims to have listened to Van Morrison’s 1968 creative breakthrough Astral Weeks more than any other record, every time worrying he’s exhausted it, every time discovering anew that it still hasn’t given itself up. He submits several reasons why this might be in When That Rough God Goes Riding: Listening to Van Morrison (Public Affairs, $29), though none convince me so much as the one he’s not quite certain of, thus forming it as a question: “Is it because it has no ending?”

Morrison gets down with Janet Planet

First time I heard Astral Weeks I must have fallen into a trance. I was sure the record consisted of three, maybe four songs. I was later shocked to discover the eight listed on the back cover. It feels like traveling, this record, like following a path in the dark that leads to changes in topography you hadn’t anticipated yet in retrospect seem the natural result of all that came before. Marcus gets at something similar when discussing the yarragh, which William Butler Yeats once described as a sort of Celtic lament, which for our purposes we might loosely align to the Spanish concept of duende—in his 1999 essay ‘The Secret Life of the Love Song,’ Nick Cave memorably declared that duende “pursues Van Morrison like a black dog and, though he tries to, he cannot escape it.” Marcus locates the yarragh in Morrison as “the voice that strikes a note so exalted you can’t believe a mere human being is responsible for it, a note so unfinished and unsatisfied you can understand why the eternal seems to be riding on its back.”

When That Rough God Goes Riding, which is more a collection of short essays than a sustained consideration of Morrison’s work, is at its best in rapturously articulate passages such as these, as well as in smaller, sometimes quirkier digressions. Marcus considers Morrison’s performance of ‘Caravan’ in The Last Waltz, wearing that amusingly snug outfit and kicking his right leg in the air like a Rockette, and later pays loving homage to Morrison’s donning of hot pants in ‘Moonshine Whiskey.’ Marcus is wonderfully sensitive to the nuances of Richard Davis’ bass work on Astral Weeks. Marcus tells a vivid personal story about a schoolmate’s bohemian mom whose image he recalls while listening to ‘Madame George.’ He’s very good with the strange, hushed aural space Morrison inhabits with ‘Linden Arlen Stole the Highlights’: “the louder you try to make it, the more it recedes, until it reaches as far as it will go toward silence, making you lean into it.”

Morrison getting his kicks in The Last Waltz

Marcus can be less persuasive when making cross-media comparisons, ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’ to Raymond Chandler’s Little Sister, a somewhat intriguing case, or ‘Friday’s Child’ to a scene in Anton Corbijn’s Control, which could have just as easily been a million other things. He seems determined to spend an awful lot of ink describing the movie Breakfast on Pluto before analyzing its use of Morrison’s music. I appreciated Marcus’ audacity to write off 16 entire years of Morrison’s work—“The tedium was almost heroic in its refusal to quit,” he quips—yet if you’re familiar with the work in question, as well as with other less reputable records that Marcus champions, you can’t help but yearn for closer readings of Morrison’s whole 45-year oeuvre, rather than the scattering of musings collected here. But I suppose the scattered, associational nature of When That Rough God Goes Riding could be seen as Marcus’ own riff on the yarragh. I closed the book without any doubts as to the sincerity of Marcus’ stray assertions about this artist he so clearly reveres, even those that admit their own inconclusiveness. It takes a certain critical flair to end an essay with the confession that “what I value most is how inexplicable any great work really is.”

What remains: The Road

The images that open The Road feature a leaf-lined branch warmed by the sun. Somewhere nearby stands a beautiful mother-to-be. Observing her is a handsome man stroking a horse. These fragments of a becalmed pastoral paradise are fleeting, vanishing as that same man wakes from his memory-laden dream. A handful of years have passed, perhaps seven, judging from the age of the boy who accompanies him, but the man appears to have aged decades, his face lined with grime-streaked gutters, his teeth half-rotted. Still, his transformation is nothing compared to that of the world he inhabits. The topography resembles a five-day beard on a wretched old man. Fires line the horizon, the sky’s an endless gloaming, and the colour green has forsaken us. Food is scarce, earthquakes are frequent, and what’s left of mankind has largely been reduced to foraging ghouls. At least there are still books. The man reads one to the boy. It catalogues animals, each of which is now presumed extinct.

The man (Viggo Mortensen) and boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee) are making their way south, on foot, in beat-to-shit puffy coats, with dwindling supplies and a revolver with two bullets left, just enough to ensure double-suicide should some horrendous murder suddenly become a certainty. Those aching memories of fecund nature and familial blossoming are the last vestiges of warmth and beauty available to them, though the dying landscapes they pass through possess an undeniable fascination, at least for those of us just visiting for a couple of hours. The most commonplace items become miraculous here: shampoo, Coke, toothpaste, a can of pears. Their magic is intensified by the boy’s first-ever discovery of their comforts—he was born into this. The preservation of his innocence is all the man lives for, his answer to the question of why go on. His wife opted for suicide, along with most people with sense or dignity.

The book is from Cormac McCarthy, author of All the Pretty Horses, Blood Meridian and No Country For Old Men. Like No Country, The Road is a kind of western, the man with no name charged with chaperoning the boy through lawless terrain, their destination being the Gulf Coast and its vague promise of less hostile conditions for homesteading. Like the Coen Brothers’ film of No Country, The Road, scripted by Joe Penhall, is an unusually faithful literary adaptation, and director John Hillcoat, who last helmed The Proposition, easily one of the best westerns of the decade, offers a realization of McCarthy’s post-apocalypse that’s richly detailed, surprisingly suspenseful, and hauntingly vivid. A notable difference between the films of No Country and The Road however is that where the Coens nurtured atmosphere with an uncharacteristic paucity of scoring and voice-over, Hillcoat’s enlisted his old friends Nick Cave and Warren Ellis to supply the scoring, which is gorgeously mournful, so evocative as to be a sort of adaptation in itself. The problem being that there’s so much of it. Along with Mortensen’s weary voice-over—the pairing of disembodied voice and music recalls the films of Terrence Malick, The Thin Red Line in particular—the hypnotic score lulls us during scenes where we should ideally be alert to the tiniest, most nuanced sound, gesture, and image. It’s hardly the worst problem for a movie to have—an abundance of something beautiful and well crafted—but it does finally swath everything in a single tone, unintentionally protecting us from some harrowing moments.

Yet his central reservation of mine felt less important upon my second viewing of The Road, which allowed me to better forget the source material and focus more on the tremendous emotional connection between the brilliantly-cast Mortensen and the very natural, wide-eyed Smit-McPhee. During the second half I realized how, beneath the unfathomably bleak milieu, The Road is finally a story about father and son, about what a parent lives for and what a child tries to retain as he carries on alone. The accumulation of moments of desperate searching and running, of laughter and play—rare, but memorable—and of mutual learning about how to negotiate with the unruly world becomes resonant, and unforgettably moving. So see The Road, and then, perhaps, see it again. There’s something precious amidst all that darkness.

Father, son, and holy terror: Nick Cave's The Death of Bunny Munro

Nick Cave, with friend

It begins with a sudden, shuddering, wholly irrational yet undeniable awareness of encroaching doom, Nick Cave’s chronicle of a death foretold letting us in on its ending from the title on down, so we can better appreciate the particular strange, sordid path it takes to get there. The Death of Bunny Munro is Cave’s second novel, his first in the 20 years that have passed since the publication of his debut And the Ass Saw the Angel. This one could be titled And the Asshole Saw the Angel of Death. Bunny’s uncharacteristic vision of oblivion—he’s normally the optimistic type—arrives not in the midst of some serene moment of contemplation but rather in a rented room at the Grenville Hotel, where he lingers in his underwear, drunk, with a prostitute standing by as he tries to placate his wife over the phone, who’s upset because among other things a madman’s running loose somewhere in England, wearing devil’s horns, and savagely attacking women. As his wife airs her fears, Bunny can see CCTV footage of the maniac on the telly. He’s not sure what to make of the guy, but as his story unfolds, we’ll come to see the horned killer as the flamboyant manifestation of Bunny’s Id, his even darker double, deprived of the most basic social skills that even Bunny can boast of, running rampant. The men represent two different kinds of ladykiller. “Some part of Bunny takes all this personally, but he is not sure why.”

Bunny is a salesman of high-end beauty products. His favourite radio program is Woman’s Hour, which he regularly, stupidly quotes when addressing his uniformly female clientele. Virtually everything in Bunny’s life is calibrated to yield more sex. His way with the ladies is perhaps hard for some of us to understand, “but there’s a pull, even in his booze-blasted face, a magnetic drag that has something to do with the pockets of compassion that form at the corners of his eyes when he smiles, a mischievous arch to his eyebrows and the little hymen-popping dimples in his cheeks when he laughs.” In short he is a devoted sexual predator, probably a genuine sex addict—rather unusually for a middle-aged man, he seems to have a hard-on all the time—and he uses whatever tools lay at his disposal to satisfy his need, which creepily enough is not so much for women per se as for their reproductive organs. Some of his buddies describe themselves as tit-men or leg-men, but Bunny is a dyed-in-the-wool vagina man. He fantasizes about vaginas, or even just clitorises, free-floating in space or collected in a little matchbox. He’s especially interested in celebrity vaginas, and has a special thing for Kylie Minogue and Avril Lavigne (who both receive special apologies in the postscript). In waves of inspired perversion and grotesquerie, Cave has accessed the murkiest, most reptilian depths of the male psyche to create this idiot monster. Not as monstrous as, say, the eponymous protagonist of ‘Stagger Lee,’ one of the most irresistibly sick songs in the mighty canon of Cave’s recording career with the Bad Seeds, but you can see how the two might get on together.

Cave, working at his day job

The novel follows Bunny from the discovery of his desperately unhappy and neglected wife’s suicide through his resolution to get right back to work selling and screwing, taking his young, helplessly dad-adoring son, little Bunny Junior, out of school and along for the road trip. What makes The Death of Bunny Munro palatable, even transcendent in its way, is firstly the brilliant, frequently hilarious wit, on par with the best early novels of Martin Amis, who’s crafted a few truly despicable protagonists of his own in his time; secondly its willingness to really sink into an explore Bunny’s sad little soul and seek out the parts of it that eerily reflect something in virtually all men; thirdly, the presence of Bunny Junior, genuinely innocent and wracked with a mixture of wonderment and grief; and fourthly, Cave’s already legendary facility with language. He’s often said that prose, as well as screenplays—he scripted John Hillcoat’s superb 2005 outback western The Proposition—are actually far easier for him to write than song lyrics, which demand a compaction that challenges Cave’s natural inclination toward storytelling, baroque description, and elaboration. His songs are littered with a dizzying array of characters immersed in private worlds of violence, madness and heartache. All three of these feature prominently in his new novel, even the latter, since, while he can hardly make any sense of it, Bunny does seem to miss his dead wife, is literally haunted by her. To say the very least, it’s tough to like Bunny, but it’s tougher not to become engrossed in his tale.

The novel was prompted by Hillcoat’s suggestion that Cave write him a new screenplay. The screenplay quickly became something else, but its origins are detectable in its engaging use of present-tense, and its forward motion. (Oddly enough, there are some fundamental similarities between this story and that of Hillcoat's new film The Road.) It’s also consumed with visuals, Bunny’s attention to minute physical details, even nail polish; Bunny Junior’s attention to all the strange things he encounters on his journey that need interpreting, usually with the aid of his trusty child’s encyclopedia; and Cave’s attention to the spoils of popular culture cluttering contemporary England. It all winds up to a bizarre, entertainingly hallucinatory finish, which also bears a certain cinematic flourish, though it reminded me most readily of the flipped-out ending of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s epic television series Berlin Alexanderplatz, which Cave is a confessed fan of. (There's even an appearance from a moustahced musician character that could be a Cave stand-in, aligning things even further to Fassbinder's hilarious cameo in the last episode of Alexanderplatz.) Cave has also said he’d like to see The Death of Bunny Munro made into a television series, something that would allow for more expansive character development. But in the meantime the novel has already spread beyond the confines of the page and can also be found as an audiobook, read by Cave, with music by Cave and Bad Seed/Dirty Three violinist Warren Ellis, and an iPhone application, in which you’re supposed to be able to actually see Cave read you the book. “Which all sounds like fucking nightmare to me,” Cave quipped at a recent bookstore appearance I managed to catch in Toronto. But that’s hardly a dissuasive sales tactic. Cave’s been serving up his nightmares for public consumption for 30 years now, and there’s a great many of us who still can’t get enough of them.

Workingman's blues: Aki Kaurismäki’s Proletariat Trilogy on DVD

He’s an ex-butcher with a drinking problem, currently slinging trash on the streets of Helsinki, maybe taking in a little bingo when the stars line up right. She’s a checkout girl no one ever checks out, with a hidden nurturing side, bandaging his hand when he comes in sporting a bloody injury. They don’t say much. His moustache is enormous and looks fake. She looks anemic. Maybe it isn’t paradise exactly, but there’s a genuine romance unfolding here, something hardly acknowledged in the blank facial expressions that mark both the acting style and the movie’s overall toughened-up, droll attitude towards life’s ordinary cruelties, but it’s expressed with singular eloquence in the close-up of the hand of this woman being kissed on a cold beach.

I’m talking about Nikander (Matti Pellonpää) and Ilona (Kati Outinen), the lovers on the run in Shadows in Paradise (1986), the first of three films that form Finnish writer/director Aki Kaurismäki’s ‘Proletariat Trilogy,’ newly boxed together by Eclipse, Criterion’s no-frills imprint. The trilogy wasn’t originally intended as such, and indeed, their themes, like the ubiquitous rock and roll performances, always happening somewhere in Helsinki’s bars, can be found in many other Kaurismäki movies. But they do share certain remarkable similarities that reward consecutive viewing: their quiet tributes to the haggard dignity and, in two out of three cases, redeeming solidarity of the working class; their endlessly playful interweaving of old Hollywood genre conventions, homages to Sirk, Ray and Hawks, into what would seem an ill-fitting aesthetic; and the use of starkly lyrical opening sequences constructed from images of hard work, sequences that instantly beguile and set the tone every time out.

The special brand of deadpan found in Kaurismäki’s movies could be called Bressonian comedy; it harkens back to certain silent era sensibilities, where melodrama is offset by nonplussed heroes; it found an odd kinship back in the 80s with the work of other highly individual filmmakers from very different cultures, such as Jim Jarmusch, who acknowledged the shared sensibility by casting Pellonpää in Night on Earth (91), and Takeshi Kitano, whose yakuza blow each other’s brains out with the same flattened gaze that marks Kaurismäki’s protagonists. It’s also a radical remedy for the facial gymnastic overkill of Jim Carrey. I guess it isn’t for everybody, but, in harmony with the disarmingly minimalist dialogues, the ruthlessly haiku-like editing scheme, the painterly, palpably lonesome compositions, and the often ingenious use of simple gestures to signify what other filmmakers might use ten minutes of exposition to convey, it’s an approach firmly invested in getting at something elemental in movies, stripping away at the trappings of cinematic storytelling to fulfill a particular truth about life and how the movies reflect it back at us.

Ariel (86) begins with the closing of a mine and of all prospects for the work force of some desolate town. Taisto (Turo Pajala) is given a white Cadillac by his father just before he fatally shoots himself. Taisto then up and leaves for the city, his breaking with the past announced with the collapse of the old barn where the Cadillac was stored only moments after he evacuates it. Helsinki welcomes him with only exploitive day-work, dingy flop houses and muggings, but he meets a saucy girl, divorced, with multiple jobs and a kid. Taisto is unfazed by these obstacles. In fact he decides right away they’re meant to be and she heartily agrees. The kid likes the idea, too.

But soon there’s crime and trouble, and later, with the introduction of a wonderful supporting character played by Pellonpää—who here resembles Gary Oldman as Commissioner Gordon—there comes a highly entertaining jail break, then still more trouble, then, just maybe, salvation in the form of some shadowy ship waiting in the night. This is neo-noir of an amusingly contained breed, its fatalism curbed by relentless faith in there always being one last chance at a better life, summed up in the Finnish rendition of ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow.’

With his lanky frame, dark shades and crow-mullet, Pajala could be Nick Cave’s Finnish twin. The Match Factory Girl (90), contrasting its predecessors in its fable-like gloom and revenge-driven final act, might best be described as solid material for a Nick Cave song. After an ominous opening sequence in which a log is mercilessly shaved, shredded and whittled down to a mere tiny match, we follow the sad tale of Iris (Outinen), the daughter of morose parents more than happy to subsist off of her earnings. One night after the family silently dines at an expressionistically lit dinner table, the three of them watch coverage of Tiananmen Square on the television—is it in this moment that Iris realizes how far she is from real living? Far away, students risk their lives in the spirit of resistance, while in this tiny home no one even talks.

Not a word is spoken until 14 minutes in—the whole movie’s only 69 minutes long. The first line is: "A small beer." But Iris takes a chance, buys a red dress, meets a man, only to find herself fulfilling a prophecy announced by her crude and uncaring father. He calls her a whore, and, through no fault of her own, she's taken for one. The Match Factory Girl is far bleaker than most Kaurismäki movies, but it possesses a dark poetry that’s well worth surrendering to. An odd conclusion to this loosely connected trilogy, it’s true, but a wonderful turning point in a distinctive, still striking and ongoing career.

Radical Adults deserve radical books to be written about them, but for now Goodbye 20th Century will have to do

Sonic Youth holds such a tremendous yet peculiar place in music as to confound any attempt to explain it to an unknowing bystander. One can certainly propose a lineage of sorts, tracing their roots in New York visual arts and underground culture in such a way that links them to The Velvet Underground and Talking Heads, yet Sonic Youth, with its core membership of Kim Gordon, Lee Ranaldo, Steve Shelley and Thurston Moore, has blazed a trail far longer than either of these predecessors. In fact I’d be hard pressed to think of any other more or less democratically-geared rock band in history that has stayed together and remained as active and engaged, as enthused and good-humoured, as prolific while, to my ear at least, never once phoning it in.

Their music rose out of a sensibility that for all its obsessive influences still feels somehow essentially sui generis, the product of suburban kids with gravely mistreated instruments dragging their enthusiasm for pop art, the Beats, Charles Manson, science fiction and the avant garde into their parents’ garage, producing growling enactments of a head-on collision between the monolithic guitar armies of Glenn Branca, ferocities deconstructed from punk rock and no wave, shuddering B-horror movie soundtracks, and a barely secret infatuation with classic rock, pop and jazz. I’ve been in love with the band since high school, and my familiarity with their work on record or in concert only makes classification feel that much more futile.

I’d never paid too much attention to their private lives or working practices, but, coming on the crest of a wave of new or recent SY-related literature—Moore and Byron Coley Abrams’ No Wave: Post-Punk Underground New York 1976-1980 and The Empty Page: Fiction Inspired by Sonic Youth are especially tempting reads—David Browne’s Goodbye 20th Century: A Biography of Sonic Youth (Da Capo, $27.95) seemed too intriguing to pass on. With a sprawling discography a quarter century of general activity under or beyond the SY moniker to draw upon, not to mention extensive interviews with SY and virtually everyone ever associated with the band, Browne’s relatively hefty tome promised something authoritative and thorough at the very least.

Though the prose is pretty baggy and the use of quotations often redundant, the facts and anecdotes collected in Goodbye 20th Century are indeed fascinating. That Gordon’s father wrote the first major study of adolescent factions, that her mother made clothes for the family, that the young Gordon once choreographed a dance based on a narrative deduced from her rearranging of her father’s jazz album covers, or that she later made a student film about Patty Hearst intriguingly conveys the roots of a highly unusual modus operandi. Reading about how ‘Teenage Riot’ was intended as a campaign song for imaginary US Presidential candidate J. Mascis, how SY were instrumental in getting Nirvana signed to DGC, how Chuck D performed his part in the ‘Kool Thing’ video while standing in a hallway between meetings, how Gordon once made dinner for Neil Young on his tour bus after buying raw meat from a roadside KFC: all of these items enliven and enrich anyone’s reading of the Sonic Youth story.

What’s seriously lacking in Browne’s book however anything like a close critical analysis of the band’s work, habits or lifestyle—and when Browne does suddenly try to get a little tough on the band’s music near the end, his observations, such as suddenly deciding that 2000's NYC Ghosts and Flowers, a record so sharpened with tension as to make your hairs stand on end, was the first time the band sounded "pretentious," seem way off the mark. Goodbye 20th Century may provide constant candy for curious SY fans but it rarely digs below the surface, offering only a vague idea as to how their songs are constructed and relying on rock critic boilerplate to describe their music. Browne also seems frequently overwhelmed by the band’s prolific output, barely giving us an idea of Ranaldo or Moore’s catalogue non-SY outings. And the culture junky nerds who will inevitably constitute a large part of this book’s readership will be irked by numerous minor errors found throughout: Nick Cave being called British, Bad Brains being called “The Bad Brains,” or William S. Burroughs’ Kansas home being located in Nebraska. (More frustrating still, while old WSB appears twice in the book’s truly superb photo inserts, the guy’s barely mentioned in the actual text!)

I suppose it would have been too much to expect a book about Sonic Youth to be even half as adventurous as the band’s music—yet an inventive approach to writing about music is so welcome when one surveys the music section of any store or library. On my own shelves I can quickly pick out the music-related titles that stand out in any way, nearly all of them diverging from the conventional model, whether it’s Ashley Kahn’s Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece, wild, stream-of-consciousness memoirs from the likes of Iggy Pop or Bob Dylan, Geoff Dyer’s But Beautiful or Sean Wilentz and Greil Marcus’ The Rose and the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad. Compared to these, nearly all of the standard cradle-to-grave/rise-and-fall bios seem dull and formally slavish, notable mostly for their various levels of banal, groupie-screwing dirt.

Reservations aside, I’m still deeply grateful to Browne for what amounts to an enormous investment in chronicling a unique, unruly, and still unfolding chapter in music history. What does come across in Goodbye 20th Century very well—besides its catalogue of dingy NYC apartments in the early 1980s—is a sense of how several individual, highly distinctive and equally opinionated artists can get together and continually work toward developing a sound all their own while still attempting to manage something akin to a career, as well as spouses, children and mortgages. More than is usually the case, for rock at least, the story of Sonic Youth is the story of extraordinary creativity being balanced with basically ordinary lives. And the result of such alchemy is genuinely inspiring.

The protracted, self-conscious assimilation of an established aesthetic in the realization of an extremely interesting merging of history and myth

To draw back the curtain of myth while simultaneously exploiting its allure, mining it for its commentary on what it says about our participation in myth-building: this is something a great western can do beautifully. Westerns have a special ability to be romantic and iconoclastic at once. Sam Peckinpah pulled off this particular feat at least three times, though in doing so, he seems to have helped kill off the genre for nearly everyone trying to follow his example.

Even ardent fans can probably count on their digits the number of great westerns to have appeared on the frontier since those heady 1970s. Maybe that’s why Andrew Dominik’s sophomore feature seems so intent on invoking that period in his grandiose adaptation of Ron Hansen’s novel The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford –though it would surely have benefited from a more modest approach. Dominik’s rustling prairies and half-mumbled reveries owe a debt to Terrence Malick that simply can’t be paid through these protracted misadventures into formal fidgeting and half-digested philosophy.

I figure I’m actually the target audience for The Assassination. A story about a strange kid strangely obsessed with his hero, gradually coming to a place where he eclipses him by consuming him, a story loosely told in painterly Albertan landscapes and enigmatically detailed scenes of stark, awkward violence –I generally gobble this stuff up. And it doesn’t hurt that it’s shot by Roger Deakins and scored by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. (Cave even appears in the film, singing the same tune as that hapless minstrel in Sam Fuller's I Shot Jesse James, a movie that's pretty much the exact opposite of The Assassination in every way imaginable.) Yet maybe its because the film has so much going for it that it continually annoyed me so. There’s such poetry inherent in the material, such talent involved, that it should have been much better.

The film’s voice-over is risibly redundant, frequently telling us precisely what the actors are doing on screen, albeit in the purple prose of antiquated literature. Every time Dominik ended another self-consciously pretty scene with another fade to black, only to open on another very pretty scene with Vaseline around the edge of the lens and yet more voice-over, I think I actually slapped my head in wonder that someone could work so hard to kill the momentum of a picture.

Pretty too is Brad Pitt as James, a not-too present presence who sort of pops up now and then to look groomed and tormented or bully somebody around. At one point he sadistically beats a little boy and then cries afterwards. More interesting is Casey Affleck’s Ford, who at least is effortlessly convincing as a twerp. There’s a memorable, tremendously creepy moment where Ford lists all of the things he believes he has in common with James. But the film’s most appealing performance is arguably that of Paul Schneider, whose tenure with David Gordon Green has given him the chops to give a genuinely rascally reading of a line like “They say when a woman’s on fire you’re supposed to roll her around on the ground and cover her up with your body!”

There are, to be sure, certain moments and ideas in The Assassination I won’t forget for some time. The thing is, rather than making me want to go back and see the movie again, almost every one of them make me want to just read Hansen’s book.

The Proposition: Hillcoat and Cave renovate the western, conjure devils in the outback, get spooky, poetic, violent as all hell

Set in the 1880s Australian outback, The Proposition shakes the dormant Western genre to life from its opening shoot-out, in which the ear-shattering pings of bullets perforating a tin shack echo amongst hysterical cries and bodies shudder below shafts of scalding sun in fear and maybe some kind of demented ecstasy. This is the colonial nightmare unfiltered, moulded by a loose but lean narrative shape and mined for the sort of savage poetry that allows us to recognize it as being very much about our conflicted human souls.

“I will civilize this place,” proclaims local authority Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone) once this chaos subsides, revealing no hint of irony as he viciously pistol-whips whimpering young Mike Burns (Richard Wilson) and offers Mike’s older bother Charlie (Guy Pearce) the ultimatum of journeying into the godforsaken hills to assassinate eldest brother Arthur (Danny Huston) or else condemn Mike to death: this is the cruel proposition of the title. The Burns clan are Irish outlaws in a lawless land, murderers and rapists the lot, and a smear on the dream of expanding the British Empire into this country otherwise inhabited solely by men regarded by the enlightened invaders as less than animals.

The Proposition is only the third feature in as many decades from director John Hillcoat, and it fits thematically into his small but distinctive body of work, intelligently dealing as it does with how the mechanics of state violence and control shape communities. As for writer Nick Cave, though he contributed to Hillcoat’s 1988 prison drama Ghosts… of the Civil Dead, The Proposition marks the proper screenwriting debut of singer-songwriter, and through this fresh collaboration the best in each becomes manifest. The work is both historically and politically sophisticated, and also infused with the Old Testament poetry and fatalistic romanticism that distinguishes Cave as one of the finest, most unapologetically literary lyricists alive (evident not only in Cave’s Joseph Conrad-inspired script but also in the whispery, eerily desolate score supplied by Cave and Bad Seed/Dirty Three violinist Warren Ellis).

There is a brutally clear beginning and end to The Proposition, bridged by a stream of evocative middle. With context and complexity of character supplying our sense of penetrating deeper into the film’s heart of darkness, atmosphere equals story here—what’s so memorable are often moments of reverie that linger between bursts of violence, details like the branches twisted into arthritic claws by sun and thirst, flies blanketing the backs of witnesses to an almost bleakly comical, seemingly endless public lashing, or the delicate surfaces of the fine china and English rose garden treasured by Stanley’s wife Martha (Emily Watson), the film’s lone woman and one source of its scattered moments of genuine tenderness.

No one’s left uncompromised yet neither is even the most aberrant character drawn without some trace of humanity, the marvellous cast deserving much credit. Winstone’s Stanley, red face and black eyes pinned down into glistening watermelon seeds, seems hopelessly numbed to human suffering but is consoled by Martha’s pride and the innocence he tries to maintain in her through keeping her isolated from the wretched town he oversees. Huston’s devil crouched in the wilderness seems to have no difficulty reconciling his acts of malice with his love of poetry, nature and the family that drives him literally to tears. And Pearce’s soul-drained searcher, tortured, resurrected, betrayed by his master and abandoned to an even deeper loneliness than is suffered by the others, is the actor at his finest, bringing a ragged humanity to an archetype rendered far more obliquely in the spaghetti westerns of the ’60s.

I can’t think of anything like The Proposition out there these days—but then I’m not sure anyone ever made movies quite like this. It’s funny—and inspiring—how a dead genre can still bring out the best in some of our best filmmakers, Hillcoat, Jarmusch, Eastwood, et al.