A MOST BRUTAL 'PROPOSITION'.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

The suffocating heat is almost palpable, and you could all but wipe the grime off of ... well, everything. And then there are all the flies - on corpses, on refuse, and sometimes flying into breathing mouths.

``The Proposition'' captures the sheer physical oppression of the Australian Outback, circa 1880, like few films have. But it just as effectively acknowledges the desert's terrible beauty.

Directed by John Hillcoat from a script by noir rocker Nick Cave, this down-under Western matches visuals to its theme - how tough it was to bring something of value to a place steeped in frontier savagery - with a vengeance.

But that doesn't make ``The Proposition'' easier to watch, nor in the end as profound as it aspires to be. There are great moral and philosophical questions bandied about amid bouts of shattering violence and cruel torture, but they don't reach any kind of coherent conclusion.

Film fans will dig the many homages to the great 1960s Westerns of Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone, but well before its brutal, soul-annihilating climax, ``The Proposition'' just weirds out, like something that's been left in the desert sun too long.

The title deal is offered by one Capt. Stanley (a terrific Ray Winstone), an English law-enforcement professional assigned to quell banditry and suppress insurgent Aborigines in the Big Empty. He makes it to Charlie Burns (Guy Pearce), the middle brother of a particularly nasty criminal family. Captured with his dimwitted younger sibling Mike (Richard Wilson), Charlie is given the option to go find the escaped leader of their gang, Arthur Burns (Danny Huston), and kill him in exchange for his own and Mike's release.

Stanley keeps Mikey in custody, and if Charlie doesn't deliver on his end of the bargain by Christmas, the kid hangs.

Unforgiving as Stanley seems, we soon discover that he's a thoughtful man who's taken quite a professional risk. Everyone in the clapboard town that passes for territorial headquarters just wants revenge on the Burnses for their raping and murdering ways - even Stanley's tender English rose of a wife, Martha (Emily Watson), whom he strives mightily to shield from the area's overwhelming ugliness. But letting Charlie loose catastrophically undermines Stanley's authority.

Charlie has his own soulwrenching problems. When he finally finds Arthur and the rest of the gang, the super-psycho older brother we've been expecting to meet turns out to be a rather poetic champion of the environment and family values. He is indeed also a conscienceless sociopath, which never quite makes full character sense, though Huston plays him with great charisma and scene-by-scene intelligence.

Anyway, Charlie agonizes over what to do, much as Stanley is tormented by the awful inevitability of what's bound to happen.

For extra added pain, there are public floggings, Aborigines with deadly accurate spears and John Hurt hamming it up as an alcoholic bounty hunter.

It's all very rough stuff, done in the service of questioning complacent notions about civilization and its supposed superiority.

Hillcoat and Cave clearly have astute ideas to impart, but their passion for gore and grime overwhelms all intellectual activity, and ``The Proposition'' gets commandeered by the Lord of the Flies.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

THE PROPOSITION - Two and one half stars

(R: violence, nudity, racism, language)

Starring: Guy Pearce, Ray Winstone, Emily Watson, Danny Huston, John Hurt.

Director: John Hillcoat.

Running time: 1 hr. 44 min.

In a nutshell: The dirtiest - and one of the goriest - Westerns that's probably ever been made. And it's Australian, so there are some spacey philosophical points that it's trying to make but can't. Written by gloom rocker Nick Cave.