Film Review: Brokeback Mountain (dir. Ang Lee (no relation), 2005)

I saw this film last weekend, and I've been thinking about it all week. It's really a great film. Partly it's great because it's a great story, about star-crossed lovers and the damage that their ill fortune (i.e., they are both men) does to them and the people around them--especially Ennis's wife, Alma, played by Michelle Williams in a performance deserving a nomination, minimum. (Btw, all four "leads" do nudity in this film, including Anne Hathaway of Princess Diaries fame. Which is queer in its own way.) But the damage to Ennis (Heath Ledger, in a performance deserving more than an Oscar) is the greatest, perhaps, although Jack does get killed . . . as Ennis says, Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) ruined his life. If he hadn't fallen in love with Jack, he would have married Alma and had been satisfied. But his relationship with Jack was both the romance of his life, in many ways the best thing, the true-est thing that ever happened to him, but also the worst. It cast him as an outsider, as someone always distant, even for a cowboy, from those he should have been close to. Here the film cheats a little, giving us a brief moment of reconciliation with his older daughter and signs, at the end of the film, that he may close that distance that has been imposed between him and, well, the world.

That ambiguity--that the love between Ennis and Jack is both the greatest and the worst thing that ever happened to Ennis--is what makes the story great. This is not a "love conquers all" story. Love, frankly, cannot conquer all. It can't conquer social prejudice.

Partly it's great because of the performances. That must be mostly Ang Lee (again, no relation). Ledger and Michelle Williams give the performances of their lives, and Gyllenhaal is great, as well.

Partly it's great because of the natural beauty of the setting, in Wyoming.

If you haven't seen this film yet, and it's playing where you live, you should go see it. It will also see a wider release next week. Despite playing on fewer than 500 screens, the film has grossed more than $ 22 million and is number nine on the box office chart.

Sam and Rebecca agree. Rebecca complains that this not a gay movie because that term refers to a particular subculture, which didn't exist until after the main part of this story had happened and which, frankly, Ennis and Jack are not part of. I'm not an expert here, but I'm sure that that is the way the term is used in technical discourses. But that means that this can't be the gay cowboy movie. It has to be the homosexual cowboy movie. OK, I can live with that. (A little bird reminds me that Ennis and Jack aren't tending cows, but sheep. But "the homosexual shepherd movie" really doesn't work for me.)