A Rare Film

Rating: 10/10 (7 February 2006)

What a great film: spare and unsparing, bleak and rich, beautiful and ugly, but most of all truthful. Ang Lee has done an outstanding job of adapting the Annie Proulx story, one that retains the qualities that make that story so moving.
There's been a lot of speculation about how people are going to take this story, but if they stay away out of prejudice or fear, that's their loss. They will miss the chance to see and feel what it's like to love someone and not be able to be with them; to have permission to exist, but not to be really alive. There are plenty of movies about men and women who suffer this fate through one circumstance or another. This is something rare, and it's done without preaching or rationalizations. It's just what happens to two men, and you watch them handle it as best they can.
The actors are wonderful, and I give Ang Lee credit here, too, for creating an atmosphere that allowed them do this kind of work. The two leads could have been perhaps less handsome and more rawboned, but Heath Ledger's eyes tell you everything you need to know about how much Ennis has been hurt in his life, and Jake Gyllenhaal's body language is all vulnerability and yearning. You come to feel their frustrations and hurt right along with them as they try to manage a kind of furtive marriage over a period of twenty years.
The supporting players look like they were picked up from the very roads of Wyoming. Randy Quaid as the sheep owner and Roberta Maxwell as Jack's mother were my favorites, but the women who played the wives were also very good. It was nice to see Anne Hathaway get a chance to do something other than fluff, and Michelle Williams did a great job of showing how hard it was to keep swallowing her resentment and anger. The landscapes are vast, empty and beautiful, and the little towns and ranches are just as weather-beaten, dust-laden, dirt-poor and isolated as the people who live there.
Ultimately I envy Ennis and Jack, for all their troubles. They do find real love, and it means so much to them that they pay a hard price to keep it. They know what really counts.