Ground-breaking

Rating: 9/10 (1 February 2006)

"Whatever you do, don't call it 'the gay cowboy movie'". Well, that is what it is and no mistake. And Thank God for it. If it wins the Oscar as Best Picture as expected, it will herald a major breakthrough in Queer Cinema. It's stars and it's director may well be trumpeting their heterosexuality recently but the characters portrayed here, for all the marriages and family business they get involved in, are, at least, bisexual and the all consuming passion in their lives is for each other. The film is infinitely more explicit in reminding us of that than the Annie Proulx short story on which it is based. Proulx's story is a masterpiece of conciseness. Lee's film expands on it way beyond it's boundaries. In doing so, something is gained and something is lost.
What is gained is a life for Jack and Ennis outside of the story's insular meetings, in particular scriptwriters Larry McMurty and Diana Ossana, who have done a remarkable job in expanding the narrative while retaining much of Proulx's original dialogue, have given much greater emphasis to the wives the men cannot bring themselves to love and both Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway wrench every ounce of sympathy they can from these roles.
What is lost is Proulx's ability to floor you with a single sentence. Passages that, in Proulx's words, are emotionally devastating simply fail to strike the same chord on screen. It is as if Lee can't connect with the feelings he is attempting to portray. The film simply didn't move me.
That said, it still has great moments. The long, slow build-up on the mountain is superb. And in these scenes Heath Ledger seems to be reaching deep inside his character, and both actors are deeply convincing lovers and not just in the sexual sense. Butch and Sundance, they ain't; there is fire in their bellies and an extraordinary physicality in their acting, particularly on the part of Jake Gyllenhaal who is a real revelation here, (his would be the most deserving of any Oscars the film wins). Ledger is less convincing in the later scenes, (the director doesn't attempt to age them which is a mistake), and I think he is largely to blame for dissipating the emotional force of the film's climax.
It's success, of course, is both welcome and surprising. Welcome in that, at last, mainstream cinema is able to tackle the subject of homosexuality in an honest, unsensational and moving fashion without rancour or shame and find a mass audience at the same time. Surprising in that, essentially, Lee's film is, despite it's length and the breadth of those mountains, an intelligent, small scale, interior piece; an art-house movie that Hollywood has claimed for it's own.