Hey folks, Harry here... When Copernicus blew off the second half of Toronto to come enjoy the blissful fun of the second half of QT 6 - this was one of the films that he was wildly praising. He really did seem to like BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN - don't see why that should have been a surprise, the story it is based on is quite fantastic. Here ya go with Copernicus' look at BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN!
BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN
I don't know why I doubted Ang Lee. Maybe I had Hulk burn. Maybe I didn't want to see a movie about gay cowboys. After all, this is exactly the stereotypical pretentious film festival movie according to South Park (though mercifully sans pudding here). Well, my doubts were unfounded – Ang Lee has achieved cinematic redemption with BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, guaranteeing himself a truly silly haul of Oscars come February. If you still doubt his talents, consider this: he has turned Heath Ledger into the frontrunner for Best Actor. And if you are still unconvinced, think about it this way: surely you want to see the sodomite movie that religious freaks are guaranteed to demonize.
This is the epic saga of two cowboys, Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) who are hired to be shepherds one summer on what must be one of the universe's most stunning places to feed your sheep, Brokeback Mountain. Both are hard workers and men of few words, but in banding together against the wilderness they quickly develop a rapport that transcends both friendship and cowboy mores. But as each returns home to start families, they find themselves unable to match the profound and idyllic experience they shared that summer together. Over the next two decades their inability to recapture anything more than fleeting happiness causes their lives to slowly disintegrate.
Tales of forbidden love are as old as storytelling itself, but making the characters gay in a time and place where tradition holds such sway that murder is a routine response injects a palpable sense of menace into the story. Diana Ossana and Larry McMurtry (The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment) adapted the screenplay from Annie Proulx's short story, which was published to great acclaim in the New Yorker in 1997. The talent packed into the screenplay shows in its subtlety, as much of the drama arises from what goes unsaid in an era when the actions of the leads were truly unspeakable. Similarly, the breakdown of the stone fortress of emotion that the stoic cowboy embodies charges the film with dynamic characters that are a cinematic goldmine.
Only acting talent that could match the quality of the writing would do it justice, and here Jake Gyllenhall and Heath Ledger achieve perfection. They are convincing as cowboys, give nuanced performances, and even manage to pull off an electric chemistry. The favorite for the Oscar has to be Ledger – he has a slightly jucier role, the perfect drawl, and the look behind the eyes that he's concealing a roiling inner turmoil.
Just as breathtaking as the acting and writing are the visuals. Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto trades the grit and gloom of Amores Perros and 21 Grams for magnificent, wide-open pastoral shots of the characters on the mountain. Here the cowboys are the timeless embodiment of freedom itself. But as family life in the 60s and 70s wears on, they seem literally trapped in the times.
The challenge for BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN will be to get audiences to go see it. I almost didn't, thinking that I wouldn't have much in common with gay cowboys. When I told this to a friend, she said, "Bullshit. You don't have anything in common with rapists and murderers, but you see movies about them all the time." She had a point there. It turns out, anyone who has had to face tough decisions as an adult will connect with this movie. And forbidden love is so universal that Hollywood churns out a predictable slate of retreads with the theme every year. BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN isn't one of those movies though – it tackles the age-old problem in a fresh and interesting way.
Maybe the most telling aspect of the quality of BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN is that I was intending on only watching the first half so that I could get to TIDELAND on time. But I found I just could not pull myself away. Ang Lee has constructed a film with such superb writing, visuals, and acting that it will be appreciated long after most of the rest of the movies from this year are forgotten.
-Copernicus
