A story whose time has come

Rating: 8/10 (19 February 2006)

I felt as soon as I heard about this movie, that its story was a fruit ripe for plucking. I realized that the attraction *between* the rugged, laconic men of the great outdoors, adds fresh life to and a modern perspective, to a genre that many Americans loved for a long time.
I am of the baby boomer generation, raised on western TV shows, movies, even radio: from corny or straight-ahead Hop-Along Cassidy, Gene Autrey, the Lone Ranger, Gary Cooper in High Noon, Henry Fonda, Rowdy Yeats of Rawhide, Gunsmoke, Have Gun Will Travel, through more updated ones like Bonanza, Sugarfoot, The Rebel,and hip, wiseacre ones like Maveric, and post-modern ones like Clint Eastwood's spaghetti westerns, I watched them all.
I never could stand John Wayne, though, and didn't care much for James Arness. The shoot-em-up at the end was satisfying for a long time, but eventually it started to seem cheap and shallow to me. (Someone bit the dust in almost every one of those shows, five nights a week for ten years or so.) The lonely, laconic, tough, austere, hard-tried man, with a hidden vulnerability or sensitivity revealed only through great crisis: that's what I liked. As I child, I deeply resented it when female characters even made an appearance in those shows, except, perhaps, Miss Kitty, who knew her place and stayed in it.
Brokeback Mountain has all those elements in abundance. In feeling, to my definition, it's a classic western, much improved; realistic and believable: dust, hard work, horses, big sky, rugged country, austere morality enforced by threatened violence, and two tough, rugged, self-sufficient, laconic, handsome, suffering guys.