Horrid

Rating: 2/10 (8 September 2008)

It is incumbent upon all good critics to be honest about possible biases, so here goes. When I first read E. Annie Proulx's short story collection Close Range, I knew Brokeback Mountain was, by far, the worst of the stories in her very erratic collection, and a really bad story, period. Not because it had gay characters, but because the whole book is a long string of Western stereotypes and caricatures. Reading the tale, it was quite obvious that Proulx has probably never met a gay person, much less a gay cowboy, in her entire life.
However, after recently viewing the film that beat it out for the Oscar, Crash- a horrendous film, if there ever was one, I was prepared to concede that there was no possible way Brokeback Mountain, which I doubted could even be a passable film, could sink as low as Crash. After all, Crash crammed a dozen or so PC tales into its nightmare, whereas this film was only gonna force feed a viewer one PC tale. So buffered, I had made plans to begin my review of this film with something admitting the above, like, 'Yes, Brokeback Mountain is better than Crash, but chlamydia is better than AIDS, so what's the point?' But, I now again have to rewrite how I approach dissecting this film, for, as I set forth to watch Ang Lee's latest film, I was unprepared for just how interminably dull and poorly written and acted this film was.
Yes, it's terminally PC, and no, it's not a love story, any more than the addle-minded and obnoxious young boob lovers in Titanic were in love. It's a tale about, let's face it, two horny guys who like branding each other in the wild. And yes, there is great scenery. This film trumps Crash cinematographically in every way. But, Crash sped through its many tales and characters so quickly that it was more like a music video, and, as a consequence, it was like a quick bug that, once you let out its last bad remnant, the fever lifted within minutes. Brokeback Mountain is like a festering herpes sore that will take a week or two to go away, but you just know it's gonna recur and damn your sleeping hours every now and then.
The story of the film is so familiar that to reiterate it seems a waste of space. this is an incredibly dull, trite, tendentious, and tedious film, whose two leads are deceitful and thoroughly despicable losers whom even the film knows are not worth the time in developing, especially when the 'message' is there to sell it. As proof of the ignoble nature of the leads, Ennis even mumbles to Jack, 'Because of you, I'm nowhere,' blaming everyone but himself for his own shallow and insidious misery. This sort of bad writing, and dubious moralizing, makes Brokeback Mountain every bit as bad a film as its music video-like Oscar-winning rival, Crash.