Not a good script, which is a damn shame.

Rating: 5/10 (23 January 2006)

My viewing of Brokeback Mountain admittedly suffered from the hype surrounding the movie. Throw the Golden Globe for Best Drama on top of the other critical acclaim and you have the makings for a tremendous movie, right? Brokeback Mountain, as everyone knows by now, surrounds the relationship of two cowboys from the time they meet forward for twenty years. Ennis Del Mar (Ledger) and Jack Twist (Gyllenhall) meet when they take a ranching job in the mountains of Wyoming. Their relationship develops slowly with neither character saying much to the other. At one point, Del Mar says about three lines of dialog and that is followed by a comment from Twist "that's more than you've said in the past two weeks" to which Del Mar responds "friend, that's more than I've said in a year." Therein lies the problem with Brokeback Mountain. There really isn't anything thrown to the viewer to give you a reason to believe the relationship between the two cowboys. There isn't a shared past or a deep, meaningful conversation about anything or even loneliness. It is really difficult to believe that any of the characters really care about each other. By the time Del Mar and Twist separate after their initial encounter, it is downright impossible to sense any sort of chemistry or feelings between the two. The next time they meet, its as though they were war buddies reunited after 25 years. It just doesn't work.
The main problem with the film is that this is one of the worst scripts in recent memory. The movie jumped in time after short scenes with little dialog or development, sometimes as much as ten years. It is a shame that this was so poorly written because the acting is outstanding, the direction was good and the scenery fantastic. All of that can't save a terribly written and developed story. I don't believe that this movie would have received all of its accolades if this script was about a straight couple - the relationships between all of the characters wasn't good enough to make the movie meaningful. I rarely agree with the Top 1000 voters, but do in this case.