Thursday, January 19, 2006
The film is graced with excellent acting across the board.
By KENNETH TURAN
Los Angeles Times
HOLLYWOOD -- "Brokeback Mountain" is a groundbreaking film because it isn't. It's a deeply felt, emotional love story that deals with the uncharted, mysterious ways of the human heart just as so many mainstream films have before it. The two lovers here just happen to be men.
Big star vehicles with homosexual protagonists are, of course, not new; one of them, 1993's "Philadelphia," even won a best actor Oscar for star Tom Hanks. But these films invariably have had an air of earnest special pleading about them, a sense that they'd rather do good in the world than tell a good story. Instead of emphasizing its apartness, "Brokeback Mountain" insists it is a romance like any other, and that makes all the difference.
Confidently directed by Ang Lee and featuring sensitive and powerful performances by Jake Gyllenhaal and a breathtaking Heath Ledger, this film is determined to involve us in the naturalness and even inevitability of its epic, complicated love story. What Larry McMurtry (who co-wrote the screenplay with Diana Ossana) said of Pulitzer Prize winner E. Annie Proulx's original short fiction is equally true of the film: "It was a story that had been sitting there for years, waiting to be told."
The protagonists
That lack of affect befits the nature of its protagonists, who begin as a pair of 19-year-old cowboys in Wyoming ranch country circa 1963. In Proulx's words, Ennis del Mar (Ledger) and Jack Twist (Gyllenhaal) were "rough-mannered, rough-spoken, inured to the stoic life," men who would mightily resist an avowedly gay lifestyle or even the label homosexual. Even after sex, Ennis could insist "I'm not no queer," with Jack adding, "Me neither. A one-shot thing. Nobody's business but ours." If great love stories are about obstacles (and they often are), this one has them to spare.
"Brokeback Mountain" had obstacles of its own to contend with. Screenwriters McMurtry and Ossana optioned the story of this enduring relationship and wrote the script soon after it appeared in the New Yorker in 1997. But the "scary and sensitive" nature of the project (Ang Lee's words) meant that it took eight years to reach the screen. Sometimes, however, good things really do come to those who are forced to wait, and it is difficult to imagine a team better suited to transferring "Brokeback Mountain" to the screen than the one that finally emerged, starting with director Lee.
A Taiwan native, Lee is completely at home in the widest variety of situations, from the mythical China of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" to the 18th century England of Jane Austen's "Sense and Sensibility." There is often something spare and removed in his direction, a willingness to be pulled back and deliberate, and those qualities enhance this film's ability to be direct and uncluttered in telling Ennis and Jack's story.
Excellent acting
"Brokeback Mountain" would not be the success it is without excellent acting across the board. Although he is hampered by an unconvincing aging job, Gyllenhaal brings a fine harum-scarum energy and feeling to Jack's character, and Williams, glummer than she ever was in "The Station Agent," illuminates all the corners of Alma's sadness.
But, more than any of the others, Ledger brings this film alive by going so deeply into his character you wonder if he'll be able to come back.