The eloquent silence of love

Rating: 10/10 (30 January 2007)

I've read here that some people cannot see love between Jack and Ennis, only lust. I feel that the power of this film is in all that was not said. BM is an intelligent film that allows us, the audience, to fill in a lot of the blanks, and that is the power of this film. Much in the way that Hitchcock in the famous shower scene of Psycho never shows the knife striking Janet Leigh, we see the blood and see her scream, but he leaves the knife penetration part up to the imagination of the audience. Each viewer reacts to their personal perception of that horror. BM succeeds in similar fashion by allowing Jack and Ennis's actions, glances, and silences, to be interpreted by our own individual perceptions. I know for me personally, the scene when Ennis opens the door to Jack's room and looks around, moved me to tears because I realized then how lonely Jack's boyhood must have been. Jack was a sensitive and beautiful young spirit growing up alone in that room, in that house, with an uneducated, primitive father, in the middle of nowhere. All of that powerful imagery conveyed to me without one word spoken. Then of course, comes the famous shirt scene in the closet. Jack truly loved Ennis, enough to keep his shirt all those years enveloped and guarded by his own shirt. All of this powerful emotion is conveyed without one word. There are no words that can describe love, so no words were necessary in this film to convey the love between Jack and Ennis, but we knew it was there because there is love in us.