It's nice enough

Rating: 7/10 (27 February 2006)

The state of drama today is frustrating. The Academy has proscribed a certain tasteful treatment of topics, with high-production values and the thrust is always "We should be more thoughtful and polite to (the hyper-intelligent, the sub-intelligent, the misunderstood criminal, the underdog, the outcast, gay cowboys)." Every recent drama can be inserted into that sentence. Even if I agree with those sentiments, it doesn't mean I want to sit through ensuing groups fed through the formula; or that I'm satisfied with that narrow recipe for drama. Life and people are deeper than that rubber-stamp allows. It's tiresome. Brokeback Mountain is the next entry in that contest. It's the kind of issue movie that the Academy loves.
As far as drama goes BBM is at the rather simple end of the spectrum. The plot is as modest as this kind of movie event can bear. You've already imagined all the scenes that it could possibly cover before you go see it. It suffers from a few small problems; increasingly bad aging make-up and a peculiar stingy, puritanical need to move critical bits of drama offstage at odd moments (usually reserved for movies directed by Robert Redford). And a major flub in which a character dies and the the sub-text receives a confusing, inept visualization not in the main viewpoint of the movie. It had my crowd asking "Who the hell's viewpoint was that?" I thought it would skimp on scenes where love grows from small bits of intimacy, but they're here and they're nice. What it does skimp on is the female characters who receive token coverage and have nothing to do.
It's what the culture needs right now; an utterly safe polite movie about the topic. If it wins the academy award it's going to have the kind of shelf-life of something like Guess who's Coming to Dinner. A look back at it from the future will present a pleasant, mild curio that wasn't as important as it seemed.
Dramatically it has some "Oh Come on!" duds like Jack popping his wife in the butt. Mmmm. how literal. And the fact that Ennis doesn't even know the sightlines of his home that offer enough privacy to make out.
I expected to dislike this movie but I didn't. Heath Ledger is quite good. It's a nice movie. It lacks a climax. But it's still in my head after two days.