If only I should come to feel a love like that

Rating: 10/10 (29 March 2006)

I posted this review in another forum but I also want to leave it here. This movie is brilliant. The first time I saw Brokeback Mountain, I left the movie theater in a dazed state, trying to digest what I just had seen. Wondering through some crowded streets of NYC on a cold, windy winter night, I never felt more alone. I hurried home.
Many movies have left me excited, intrigued and sad. But none have left me as emotionally devastated as Brokeback has. It's as if the movie insinuated itself around my very soul and wrapped its grief around my unsuspecting heart  leaving it heartbroken ever since. The beauty of this movie is that it makes the characters seem so real, so live and their pain so raw, that the sorrow that permeates the story  hinted at first in the display of the most beautiful desolated sceneries, together with a melancholic music score, sneaks in your head, and unknowingly but quite forcefully takes hold of your body and soul and never seems to let them go.
A few weeks later, after countless sleepless nights, unable to shake myself off this stupor, I saw BBM again. This time I left feeling better because it became clear to me that what I had just witnessed was one of the most beautiful love stories ever told. It doesn't matter for me that it happened to be between 2 men. Because there is something so refreshing, so innocent, so lovely about how the story unfolds, that it literally turned this quite jaded, a bit cynical New Yorker, inside out. But I gather that this movie is not meant for everyone. Considering the state of our world today, how we are brought up to fend for ourselves and how we are taught to never let our guards down, we shield our fragile selves from any hint of perceived emotional threats. And we shut down. But I guarantee 100% that if only you could keep the cynicism at bay for the length of this movie, it will transform you. Like I mention before, this movie really makes you hurt, a heartbreaking SOB of a love story that just kills you, but it can be life changing.
Both Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger are phenomenal. Period. This movie wouldn't work if either one of them didn't give his heart and soul completely. What a remarkable screen performance these two give  a performance dug directly from the heart. Amazing. Some criticize that the characters don't develop enough rapport before that first scene in the tent. Nonsense. Haven't you ever heard of something called instant chemistry? And both Heath L. and Jake G. deliver throughout the movie. I bow my head to these guys. Of course the movie wouldn't work either without the great, touching performances from Michelle Williams, Anne Hathaway and Roberta Maxwell.
This was a wonderful work from Ang Lee. To portray this movie in such a delicate, sensitive way merits all ovations it gets. During an interview, Ang Lee said that when casting, he decided to go after young and innocent. That choice has really paid off here because in a way that's why the movie works: because to find love when one is so young, so innocent, that is the purest kind of love. When tragedy hits later on the movie, and somehow we kind of expect that from the start, the only thing that remains out of this now flawed, resentful relationship is a sense of love. But Jack and Ennis' souls have been irremediably broken.
Alas, this is the price these doomed individuals pay for living a life denied and full of lies. The soul dies first before physical death occurs. We see it happen in Jack's case, his soul dying, so touchingly captured in his mournful, dead blank eyes at their last fateful meeting when he watches Ennis' truck speed away. He bitterly tells Ennis: "We could've had a good life togetherbut YOU didn't want itso Brokeback is all we got" finally letting all his resentment spill out on their most unsatisfactory relationship. To which Ennis replies, accusingly, angrily: "It's because of you Jackthat I'm like thisI'm nothingI'm nowhere" before collapsing to the ground as if the weight of this impossible affair suddenly becomes too heavy a burden for him to carry. Jack rushes back to comfort him, and they hug mightily, desperately clinging to one another for they know that they have reached some crossroads in their hearts - their relationship hanging by a thread, they cannot help but watch it slip away.
To his part, Ennis fares no better. When we last see him, alone in that empty, desolated trailer, surveying those shirts that he now tenderly guards, he swears love to a man that no longer exists but in his dreams and memories - a late cry of acknowledgment for what he always felt but never dare to express verbally during those long 20 years. And like the emptiness of his trailer, Ennis' soul, so long tormented about a crime he saw as a child and so terrified by the notion that the love of his life was another man, cries in despair for a love forever lost, and it is now destined to wither away in solitary confinement.
Thus, the tragedy and paradox of Brokeback Mountain: Love can help save a man from destroying a life that could have been but a man cannot save himself if love is left buried and hidden in the deepest corner of the human heart. Something has to give. So Jack and Ennis: if only I should come to feel a love like that, God help me, but I for one will not hold back. Thank you for showing me the reason why.