Ang Lee's latest movie is a universal story of love and longing.

Rating: 10/10 (17 January 2006)

Based on Annie Proulx's short story of the same name (first published in The New Yorker in 1997) Brokeback Mountain is the latest feature film from Taiwanese-born director Ang Lee, who also directed The Ice Storm, The Wedding Banquet and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. It tells the story of 19 year old ranch hand Ennis del Mar (Australian actor Heath Ledger) and young rodeo rider Jack Twist (Donnie Darko's Jake Gyllenhaal), who meet in the summer of 1963 while herding sheep on a Wyoming mountainside.
Inarticulate, ill-educated, and already bruised by the harsh lives they have led to date, the youths soon find their forced intimacy developing into a bond that neither is prepared for, and which in the milieu in which they live, is almost unthinkable.
"You know I ain't queer," Ennis tells his companion soon after the drunken night when the two young men first have sex. "Hell, I ain't neither," Jack replies.
Given the brutal real-life murder of gay youth Matthew Shepherd in rural Wyoming more than 30 years later, their reticence to accept the truth at such a time, and in such a place, is more than understandable.
Once the summer is over the two men separate, and in the coming years both marry and struggle to raise their respective families in a series of deft, economic scenes that flesh out many events only briefly alluded to in Proulx's original story. Most notably the screenwriters, Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, have breathed life into the personalities of the women the two men marry: Ennis' hopeful young wife Alma (former Dawson's Creek star Michelle Williams) and the feisty rodeo rider Lureen Newsome (Anne Hathaway). Both women turn in remarkable performances, displaying nuance and subtlety in underplayed roles that perfectly match Ang Lee's deft directorial tone.
Despite the new lives they have built for themselves, Jack and Ennis cannot forget their love for each another. When they reunite four years after first meeting, their brief affair is rekindled into the sort of epic romance that Hollywood myths are made of. Like all great love stories, from Romeo and Juliet to Titanic, it is a romance that, ultimately, results in tragedy.
Unlike most films, which spoon-feed information to their audiences through awkward and expository dialogue, Brokeback Mountain assumes its audience's intelligence, and tells its story largely through glance and gesture. While some might complain that the film lacks passion, as its male leads never once speak the words "I love you," to one another, their longing eyes speak volumes for those who are prepared to look for such messages. Similarly its pace, while slow by the standard of contemporary blockbusters, allows the story time to mature in such a way that its inexorable climax, when it arrives, is devastating.
Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto ensures that the film's lyrical images perfectly contrast its taut structure, while director Ang Lee has coaxed some of the most memorable performances in recent years from his young cast. Jake Gyllenhaal as Jack Twist provides the perfect balance of enthusiasm and bewilderment, while Heath Ledger conveys all the fear, anger and love that his character is unable to express verbally through his tightly-controlled physical performance.
Brokeback Mountain is a masterful example of film-making, presenting a story and characters that will haunt you long after the movie has ended. Although the insecure and the ignorant will dismiss it as 'a gay cowboy movie,' the tale it tells is universal, and will resonate with anyone, gay or straight, man or woman, who has ever yearned for a love that lay just out of reach. Brokeback Mountain is that rare example of a film in which every separate element combines to form a faultless whole, and I have no hesitation in declaring it one of the first true masterpieces of 21st century cinema.