Slightly above average

Rating: 5/10 (26 December 2005)

I find myself surprised, or maybe not so surprised, that I am in the minority by giving this film a middle-of-the-road 5, while the majority of readers here rank it either 10 or 1. Read on, then, as my comment might provide a fresh "third opinion".
Let's begin with a random note. Brokeback Mountain has been described as a "gay love story" but the most explicit nudity in the film are those with the women, notably the gratuitous nudity with Anne Hathaway's bare breasts. This is, in fact, the third time Ang Lee has asked a young, inexperienced actress to bare their breasts in a gratuitous manner. The other two being May Chin in the Wedding Bamquet and Jewel in Ride with the Devil. What is this all about only Ang Lee knows. The example here (that the director put more female then male nudity in a gay love story) illustrates the lack of focus of the film. That, indeed, is a major problem.
If the aim of the film is to portray, in a positive vein, a gay "relationship", it did not succeed. The two men we see are connected mainly by their need of sex. Other than the social constraint in the 60's and 70's, what separated the two men were mundane matters such as money and family responsibility, with which Ang Lee filled the film aplenty. That is not surprising to me. Many have praised Lee for being able to jump from genre to genre. In truth, all of Lee's films belong to the same genre, namely, family drama. Family drama is Ang Lee's comfort zone, upon which he built the movie, then added the gay theme to it. That is what Brokeback Mountain is at its core. Unfortunately, the family drama part turned out to be rather ordinary, while its permeance sidetracked the supposedly main theme -- the love between the two men -- in the film. In the end, the film is unfocused and the characters in it failed to connect.
This is not to say that the film has no merit. Heath Ledger and Michelle Williams are excellent. The best scenes in the movie, oddly, has nothing to do with the gay couple but are all played between Ledger and Williams' characters. The cinematography is good, too. The soundtrack is boring, though.