Great movie. Some minor points

Rating: 9/10 (22 May 2006)

It's a very good movie. The cinematography, setting and performance combine to create lasting emotional impacts. Indeed, there's already many reviewers who have said enough good things about the movie  and I agree with most of them. I would rather point out certain things about the movie which I don't feel 100% happy with.
1. The movie is much about the tension between what one feels inside and the constraints imposed by the outside. Heath Ledger did an amazing job embodying such a tension. Bravo! But the same cannot be said of Jake Gyllenhaal's performance. To be fair, Gyllenhaal's character Jack Twist is likely to be less mentally tormented by the social pressure. But what's troubling Jack more is the frustration of not having the life he DARES to have. At times I feel Gyllenhaal could have done better expressing this kind of frustration.
2. The most romantic scene, to me, was the one that's shown near the end  a flashback where Ennis was holding Jack from behind and whispering to him soothing words. Of course, their feelings for each other were sown when they were sheepherding. But I was not sure how emotionally intimate they actually were and how the feelings were developed back in Brokeback  besides a couple of sex scenes (one of which happened when they were kind of drunk), we were only shown that they were talking like friends. Only during the flashback near the end did I get a slightly better idea.
3. It's related to the previous point, and is not really a criticism. I am not sure whether it was each other or actually the environ free of social judgment that Ennis and Jack longed for. Put another way, is this movie more about the love between the two leads, or people's love for transitorily breaking away from convention and expressing one's true feelings? Maybe it's both  maybe the two kinds of love complement each other. And maybe it's not important to distinguish the two. It seems to me that Jack truly loved Ennis, but Ennis might love the freedom more than he loved Jack.