“The Proposition,” in its morality as well as in its geography, is not just basic but Biblical. Directed by John Hillcoat, it shows humanity striving for a New Testament way of life with a Cain-and-Abel drama on the doorstep. Captain Stanley is married to the pearl-skinned Martha (Emily Watson), who solemnly serves him poached eggs for breakfast and somehow, perhaps from another hemisphere, conjures a Christmas tree. “I’m a very resourceful woman,” she says. Their marriage is one of baffled and perspiring tenderness; even as Stanley tells her to stay in their lonely house, where Tobey (Rodney Boschman), the Aboriginal manservant, prunes red roses in front of a white picket fence, she longs to know more. You look at that fence, and at the ravishing sight of Martha at dusk, book in hand, wandering the all but grassless plain, and you can’t help thinking of the Australian outback as the last redoubt of the Western.
