Not as good as you've heard. . .

Rating: 6/10 (12 February 2006)

I don't regret seeing the movie, the scenery was beautiful, but I found the relationship between Jack and Ennis unconvincing. The passage of time that they spent together early in the movie was simply slow-moving (in fact the whole movie moved slowly) and then their first time together seemed to happen too fast and was overly violent.
The script required them to get married to women, have children and then largely ignore their families in favor of their relationship. You feel bad for Ennis's wife when she sees the two men together; you can understand her shock but it all seems a little too by-the-numbers.
One glaring issue that I spent too much time paying attention to was that the two men don't realistically age. Their children age and Anne Hathaway's wigs get bigger and poufier but apart from some hardly-noticeable wrinkles around their eyes, they don't seem to get older. Perhaps if a better makeup job was done, the audience would more feel the passage of years that they spent together.
A touching movie might be made on this subject but I didn't feel that this was it.