Broken Love

Rating: 10/10 (16 January 2006)

It seems perfectly normal, as it was in the 1960s and 1970s setting of this film, even today in 2006 to despise gay men kissing in public, and even to take a tire iron out to send the offenders to the next world is seen as justifiable homicide in some jurisdictions. This film forces us to look at our own culture's ruthless and even vicious hatred of gay men, how we force them to conform to a mold that does not suit them, how they are pressured into marriages that they do not want, and how we discard them like dirty toilet paper when they express their true selves. It might be said that gay men are the only gifts from God that we despise. For without the love of man for other men, the world would have long before dissolved into endless hatred and pride. Annie Proulx, who moved to Wyoming late in her career, was deeply touched to discover these "deuces," who struggle even in Wyoming to express themselves as intended. And, here too, they only encounter endless hostility from the straight culture. Heath is convincing as the poor subsistence ranch worker who falls in love with Jake Gyllenhaal's rodeo rider character. The beauty of the Wyoming scenery matches the beauty of the frustrated, but quite real, love between these two tragic "deuces."
I await eagerly "Brokeback Mountain: The Lovers Return."