A fascination with the antihero and an interest in mythmaking on the Australian frontier are the perhaps contradictory impulses behind The Proposition, a brutal, smelly western freighted with ruminations on the evil that men do and good intentions gone bad. Granted, that makes it only the latest in a long line of smelly westerns that upend genre conventions to re-examine a frontier characterized by racism, sexism and a callous indifference to the value of human life. What’s distinctive here is the voice of screenwriter Nick Cave — an artist always concerned with melodrama, grand gestures and Grand Guignol — who comes across clearly not just in dialogue that could have been ripped straight from his lyric sheets, but in the symbolism of the story line, which includes the outlaw as Christ figure, complete with wobbly resurrection and a single act of great mercy and humanity.

The film opens in a flurry of violence as the police besiege a hideout of the wanted Burns brothers. As the riot of explosive gunfire and quick, confusing cuts crescendos and then collapses, we’re left with matter-of-fact images of dead women in their underthings. (It may be a western in temperament, but Cave’s plotting has a decidedly gothic touch.) Immediately, the men involved in the tale get down to business. The four Burns brothers are said to have been involved in a particularly brutal rape and murder, and the police have managed to take two of them into custody. But Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone) knows neither Charlie Burns (Guy Pearce) or his simple brother, Mike (Richard Wilson), are the ringleaders, and therefore he has a proposition for Charlie: He’ll give the two younger brothers a pardon if Charlie will agree to kill his psychotic older brother, Arthur.

It’s not completely clear why Stanley thinks Charlie will take the bait. It does seem likely that he’s playing fair — that he has no intention of using his proposition as a ploy to get three brothers in custody instead of two. So he’s acting out of a legitimate desire to bring the most culpable Burns to justice. And he seems pretty torn up about the crimes committed. “What happened at the Hopkins place was unforgivable,” he tells Charlie, probably in an appeal to Charlie’s own sense of morality and humanity. “Did you know that poor woman Eliza Hopkins had a child in her belly?”

The general absence of children — of anything fertile, life-affirming, or joy-giving — in The Proposition’s Queensland milieu is key to the effect. (When children do appear, they’re watching a public flogging, which may become learned behavior.) It’s full instead of sweat, shadows, insects and bullets. When we see the Hopkins place on screen, the image is colored a sort of decadent green, like a piece of cheap jewelry that’s rested too long against the skin. Director John Hillcoat has a background in music videos, and his precision-timed approach to violence is sometimes comparable to sneaking up behind someone in a dark room in a quiet house with the intention of making noise and scaring the bejeezus out of them — the most startling scenes in The Proposition are explosive shocks of graphic violence. But the most grueling are the ones that anticipate violence, convey it in excruciating detail, and then survey the bloody aftermath. It’s not that the film is gory from start to finish; more that Hillcoat gets an awful lot of mileage out of what’s there, including a punishing explosion of nastiness in the final reel.

I’ve seen the film twice, and it played as two different stories on the two different occasions. At Sundance, I was overly concerned with the story of lawman Captain Stanley — played to gruff, searching perfection by Winstone — who’s not only playing judge and jury, but is desperate to protect his wife, Martha (Emily Watson), from knowledge of the deeds done. Back in New York, I knew that the real character to watch was Charlie Burns, whose journey leads him toward rebirth and something like redemption. It seemed a better film at Sundance, largely because the audience reaction in the largish, packed venue was so electric, Hillcoat’s every stylistic gambit working the crowd. But it also diminished on second viewing because too much of it feels, dramatically, damned near inert. Stanley seems hapless and blustery. Charlie is, up until the cathartic conclusion where he plays a key role, a cipher. John Hurt, in a minor role, tries his best to kick things into gear, but ends up looking woefully overcaffeinated, and David Wenham's snide bureaucrat is much harder to take.

Martha, though, remains interesting — she’s clearly a lady entering a man’s man’s world, framed carefully within the wide screen to emphasize the discord between her own frame and its rough surroundings. (“He’s no more than a boy,” she objects at one point, spying Mike through the bars of his prison cell. And the snide, insinuating response comes back from one of Stanley’s men: “Oh, he’s man enough, ma’am — man enough indeed.”)

But these characters are sketches rather than portraits, and the story more a pile of scraps than real meat. There’s an irony to the film’s take on familial love that’s put across with some good humor and without much pretension, that forces audience identification with the Burns gang. (It's similar to what Rob Zombie tried to pull off in The Devil's Rejects.) And it's engaging and disconcerting as revisionism, its quasi-western setting drawing the uncomfortable parallel with U.S. history over the treatment of Aborigines by Australian frontiersmen who pride themselves on their status as “white man — not beasts” and emphasizing the tensions between English and Irish colonists. The Proposition is an ambitious work, thick with history and atmosphere and clearly haunted by the ghosts of an Australian past that remains, at least where cinema is concerned, fairly obscure.