Add to the Canon of Great American Films

Rating: 10/10 (3 December 2005)

With so many excellent and insightful comments regarding "Brokeback Mountain," I feel no need to say a lot about the film's plot, acting, etc., except to say that having been fortunate enough to see an early press-screening of Ang Lee's film -- five days later, I remain emotionally devastated.
One of the songs written for the movie is titled "A Love that Will Never Grow Old," and for many, many film goers, this is a film that will "never grow old."
As the Chair of the Film Studies program at the University of Missouri- Kansas City, I teach a course titled "The Silver Screen and the American Dream" which regularly enrolls well over 300 "Red State" students. In that class we screen and study the "canon" of great American films that most show the power of film to impact the ever changing meaning of the "The American Dream" -- Chaplin's "Modern Times," "Casablanca," "Citizen Kane," "The Searchers," "Rebel Without a Cause," "To Kill a Mockingbird," "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, " on to "Bonnie and Clyde," "Easy Rider," "Midnight Cowboy," "The Godfather," etc. -- but the difficulty of finding post-1970s Hollywood films worthy of being included in this "canon" has proved to be depressingly obvious.
Suddenly, unexpectedly, out-of-nowhere, Ang Lee has given us the first film of the 21st Century to join the "canon" of GREAT American films that will be watched and beloved for decades to come. Like the truly 'canonical' American films of the past, "Brokeback Mountain" will be hitting new generations of film lovers in the gut and the heart in 2050 and 2100, as much as it does in 2005.
In this cynical age when our best film directors seem content to give us "postmodern deconstructions" of past Hollywood genres, that Ang Lee gives us a film so pure and direct in its emotional power -- with (to use Fassbinder's phrase) the "direct tenderness" of the films of Douglas Sirk -- and even more, to bring Sirk's "direct tenderness" into a rapprochement with the great, masculine Westerns of Ford and Hawks. That is what I call a a mind-blowing, gut-wrenching, heartbreaking, film-making miracle.
Some great films can "blow one's mind," othes can "get you in the gut;" others can "break one's heart." Very few hit you in the brain, gut, and heart with one blow. The last 20-minutes of "Brokeback Mountain" delivers a K.O. to the brain, the gut, and the heart in one swift hit.