Gus and Call, 100 years later.

Rating: 3/10 (7 January 2006)

I found this movie to be over-hyped, but I'm nonetheless glad that it was made, as it is truly a landmark film that NEEDED to be made for the mainstream American audience. The movies have been demonstrably successful at raising social consciousness on a variety of issues, and consciousness-raising is clearly called for on the subject of homosexuality in the United States in 2006. *Brokeback Mountain* is a landmark film because it is, as far as I can tell, the first mainstream Hollywood gay romance, starring two hot new A-list stars -- Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal -- who happen to be heterosexuals. (As I said in another of my reviews, advances in civilization are always more recent than we think. This one's happening right now.) All this is fine and dandy, but, as with almost all "landmark" films, *Brokeback Mountain* announces itself as a future historical artifact (today, who watches *Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?* out of anything more than historical curiosity?), is weighed down by its own self-importance, and finally cannot avoid preaching at us. The solemnity here gets tedious very quickly. Whenever one of the characters makes a wisecrack, the audience laughs gratefully, being hungry for some amelioration for the self-seriousness that hangs over the movie like a dark cloud. Love can be tragic, of course, but even Shakespeare provided "Romeo and Juliet" with plenty of comic relief.
The movie is NOT about "gay cowboys"; these guys actually begin as gay shepherds. Screenwriter Larry McMurtry, writer of "Lonesome Dove" (among other Westerns of both 19th- and 20th century vintage), knows that the presence of sheep in a Western setting is always an elegiac sign of encroaching civilization. In other words, sheep means that the old macho ways are dying out. I've not read the Annie Proulx novella on which the movie is based, and therefore can't judge her understanding of this milieu, but McMurtry certainly hammers home the deliberately non-tough symbolism: the boys herd untold thousands of sheep during the first portion of the movie. I suppose this is fitting, but like everything else about the movie, it's also heavy-handed. The story is set largely in Wyoming during the Sixties and Seventies: Proulx, who wrote the story before the grisly murder of Matthew Shepherd (that word again!), was certainly on to something with her subject. But McMurtry feels that he must include a couple of scenes of homophobic violence, in case we missed the point.
Meanwhile, McMurtry has trouble constructing a decent narrative out of such episodic material. The first portion sort of meanders, much like the sheep, until the boys finally get on with it . . . and then, the movie can only sort of hop around the next two decades, quite often dwelling on matters of ancillary interest. Do we really need to see Ennis beat up a couple of bikers who are behaving like skunks at the local 4th of July picnic? (Is this supposed to prove he's really not "queer"?) Or watch Jack sell tractors down in Texas? I suppose the filmmakers are trying to provide a wider context to the love affair, but they spend far too much time doing it. For a love story that implicitly trumpets its own boldness, Ennis and Jack spend remarkably little time on screen together after their first job. We catch glimpses of them trysting at their Brokeback Mountain hideaway, gradually getting grayer and paunchier and generally less sexual. I was oddly, or perhaps not so oddly, reminded of *Same Time, Next Year*, just without the fairly interesting conversations between Alda and Burstyn.
I was also reminded of McMurtry's own "Lonesome Dove", of which this film seems little more than a rewrite tailor-made for one of the pressing issues of the moment. Gyllenhaal is Jack/Gus, and Ledger is Ennis/Call. Amazingly, the corresponding character to McMurtry's Western novel dies as well, and, yes, wants to be buried in the place where he found the most happiness in life, which leaves the other character to mull over how he can fulfill his friend's final wish. Oh well, I suppose it IS clever that McMurtry rewrote his most famous characters -- macho as you could please -- as 20th century homosexuals.
All that director Ang Lee can do with this formless, yet grievously "important", material, is film it beautifully, which he majestically does, taking full advantage of the natural beauty of southern Alberta (standing in for Wyoming). I was grateful for that, and for the uniformly excellent performances from the four principals (Ledger and Gyllenhaal, along with Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway as the long-suffering wives). But as much as I enjoyed the notion of the movies' first gay love affair for mainstream audiences being set in Wyoming -- Dick Cheney's home state -- I found *Brokeback Mountain* itself to be poorly executed.
3 stars out of 10 for cinephiles of EITHER sexual persuasion; more stars for whom this sort of thing is a revelation. The more of a revelation it is, the more stars, and the more you need to see it.