Brokeback stays with you - Best film of 2005 (but as with all films, watch without expectations)

Rating: Null/10 (13 January 2006)

In a year of good movies, Brokeback Mountain stands out as the best of 2005 -- the one that will probably last with you the longest. But don't watch it expecting that. No movie benefits from such expectations, especially a small, soft-spoken one like this. Just sit back as if you've heard nothing and let it wash over you... then wait a few days and see if you can shake it. Odds are, you'll find yourself wanting to see it again. And you'll get so much more out of it if you do! Brokeback is a film about things unspoken. An aching love story told mostly between the lines. The beauty of it is that it trusts the audience. It lets us sympathize with everybody, even when they do hurtful things. There are no villains or heroes, no perfect people. All the main characters are driven by love and fear, and we understand them.
Brokeback won more Best Picture awards during awards season than any film in cinema history, and was on more Top Ten lists and #1 on more lists than any film of 2005. Even the world-renowned Sight & Sound Top Ten list from world critics put Brokeback at #1 (the ONLY Oscar-nominated film on the list).
But some have praised or panned Brokeback merely for its subject matter. Both agendas belittle the greatness and scope of the film. It's an expertly told, subtle drama about many things: the irrepressible power of both love and fear, the clash of idealism and rigidity, the pull of family and responsibility, and a particularly masculine inability to express emotion. It's also about scraping out a life in the rural American West -- which is at once jaw-droppingly beautiful and stark as hell.
Brokeback is also wonderfully funny. Like many, I actually found myself affected by it more the day AFTER seeing it, and much more upon seeing it again. It sank in, played over and over in my imagination until Ennis, Jack, Alma & Lureen felt like people I knew and wished I could help.
The movie can also make you treasure love more -- both lost and found.
NOTE: If you prefer highly stylized, high-octane dramas or romances wherein every emotion is gushingly spelled out in saccharine dialogue over sweeping violin scores and the lovers have no major flaws, this film will either be a revelation or beyond your level of interest. See Titanic again (2005 DVD release is great). But if you also love subtler, more mature drama that unfolds believably and honestly, at a smooth pace that lets you discover nuance and emotion between the lines, Brokeback is a rare, powerful treat. The pitch-perfect dialogue never talks down to you. Every tiny detail works in concert under Ang Lee's observant, Oscar-winning direction to create a painfully accurate reality.
Heath Ledger's brilliant, aching performance is mesmerizing. There's more brewing beneath the surface in his Ennis del Mar than we'll ever know -- and that restraint is what allows us to keep discovering new layers. It's as if he capped a volcano and never lets more than a wisp of steam out here and there, yet we always sense the smoldering in the depths. Rarely has an actor evoked so much with so few words. Add to that the subtle ways his voice and body change as he ages 20 years, helped by equally subtle makeup, and here's a performance that will go down in film history as one of the Greats. The New York Times rightly compared it to the best of Brando and Penn.
Jake Gyllenhaal, whose Jack Twist is a little less hidden, also delivers a stellar performance of alternately bottled up pathos and spurts of idealism. His aging is also remarkable, down to the slight paunch and shifts in posture and expression he develops. The interplay between the two leads (from rage to quiet, loving tenderness), as well as between each of them and their families, is magic. Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway shine equally bright as Alma and Lureen. Their performances and transformations are absolutely absorbing. Not a false performance in the whole movie.
Brokeback is far richer than one might think upon first viewing. More is going on in most scenes than we initially realize. Each time I've seen it, I've discovered fascinating, moving nuances. Normally I'm less emotionally affected the second time I see a drama, but Brokeback truly gets better and MORE powerful every time.
Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana so faithfully adapted and artfully expanded Proulx's story in their Oscar-winning script that Proulx said she felt like they and all the filmmakers had reached inside her head. Gustavo Santaollala's Oscar-winning score (follow-up to the great The Motorcycle Diaries) is spare, haunting, and beautifully evocative. He packs more emotional punch with a single guitar backed by pedal steel guitar and bass than another composer could have with the London Philharmonic. Rodrigo Prieto's cinematography is stunning and appropriately unadorned. Judy Becker's production design is so dead-on it's hard to believe it's not all real.
I honestly can't think of another film that ever held me in its grip like Brokeback Mountain. While no art affects everyone the same way, this reaction seems to be common. Like Proulx's original story, the film powerfully knocked me out of my own life and has haunted me ever since.
The danger of such praise is that it leads people to expect it to be more than it is. It's a simple, quiet tale about a handful of sympathetic characters. Its own isolated story. It can leave you wanting more, in a good way.
Brokeback Mountain is plainly honest -- to the last. The typical Hollywood catharsis, atypical of real life, does not infect this story, thus Brokeback does not let you go after it's over.
What greater wish could a film lover have?