Satisfactory

Rating: 7/10 (2 January 2006)

Do you know how excited I became when my screenwriter friend told me Ang Lee was making Brokeback Mountain with Heath Ledger, Anne Hathaway, and Jake Gyllenhaal? I just about flipped my wig, more or less. I just about drooled at the thought of Ang Lee tackling the landscape of the American West (here is a man whose Ice Storm continues to color my experiences of driving through southern Connecticut and Westchester--every time I pass by Rye and look at my surroundings I can't help but think of that film). And the actors? They're among my favorite young actors. That's not even mentioning the brutal story by Proulx, which ranks among my favorites shorts of all time (significantly better than anything else I've read by her).
So what happened? My idyll began unraveling around the time I saw the trailer for Brokeback, which was closely followed by an article in the Times about how the film executives planned on marketing this film as a romance. Well, it is, but looking at the images that floated through the preview it became apparent that it would also be Romantic. I hoped my instincts were incorrect; I hoped they wouldn't transform a very gritty and sexual story into a beautiful and sensual tale of woe. Proulx's prose, as Stephen Holden wrote in his review of the film, is tough and gnarled. It reminded me of an old man's knobby hands. That this style told the tale of the doomed lovers made the story all the more affecting. Jack and Ennis are Marlboro men and Proulx told their story the way they would tell it themselves. Yes it was a sad and touching romance, but it never forgot what type of men these were.
The film, unfortunately, fails to translate that style visually. The film is stunning to look at but the tale is completely Romanticized visually. In that way, it becomes more sentimental too. That's the gravest fault I can find in the film. Ang Lee managed to transform a tale of romance into an actual Romance. Moreover, the grand vistas of the West inflate this story. Proulx's tale was terse and gritty and small. The film looks epic and feels that way too. These things should not have occurred.
Allow me to quote from the Proulx story: "The room stank of s***n and smoke and sweat and whiskey, of old carpet and sour hay, stale leather, s**t and cheap soap." My censorship lessens the impact slightly, but I think that makes my point. Ang Lee did the same thing. The above sentence describes the motel room after their reuniting tryst. Mr. Lee took all that and cast the room in a rosy light. He casts the whole movie in a rosy light, while the story is dusty, dirty, and tragic.
Maybe it doesn't help that I fell in love with the story years ago. The impact of the movie--of Jack's death and the shirt within a shirt (one of the greatest images in contemporary literature)--was completely lost on me. I wasn't overwhelmed by sadness the way I was when I read the story, and I didn't cry. I cried during the previews, though, when the trailer for the film about the guy swimming across the English Channel played. I also cried at the end of King Kong and I well knew that the monkey was going to die. So then maybe it's not that I read the story but that there's something wrong with the movie--that it keeps you at arms length. That's probably true, as the Ice Storm did the same thing. At least there the distance and chill made sense and worked wonderfully; Mikey sliding lifeless down the road is still arresting. In other words, this movie just doesn't work the way it's supposed to.
That said, it's beautiful to look at, never dull, and slightly daring. As others have pointed out, the love story is straight forward--no pun intended. There's nothing that you can't find in Titanic or Romeo and Juliet. Except the doomed affair occurs between two men (oh wait, that totally happened in Romeo and Juliet, at least on the Elizabethan stage). That's nice that a major motion picture has taken the subject of same sex relationships on, and something for which we should praise the filmmakers. They do a nice job creating a convincing same-sex relationship, which is an accomplishment, seeing as how most gay characters in Hollywood films fall into some stereotype or another.
The acting is uniformly excellent as well, though I'm not as surprised as some by the turn Heath Ledger gives. It reminded me of his role in Monster's Ball. He wasn't there for long, but I remember thinking that he had something special that you couldn't see in A Knight's Tale. He does something amazing here, as he takes the more masculine of the men but allows something distinctly feminine broil under the surface. I couldn't help but feel that though he was physically the top in this relationship, emotionally he was the bottom. Gyllenhaal was quite good as well, finally proving that he can branch out. Remember that year he played the same character twice--once in the Good Girl and the other time in Lovely and Amazing? I'm not knocking him, but he had seemingly cornered the market Tobey Maguire left behind to play Peter Parker. Anne Hathaway was also a knockout as Lureen. The way her early scenes of soft sensuality transformed into a brittle hardness are impressive.
This is a good movie, though a disappointing one for me. A lot of others really seem to adore this picture, and I wonder if it derives from the unfamiliarity with the source material or if the film managed to affect them in the same way the story did me.