good, but with a strange, pop-psych flaw

Rating: 9/10 (21 January 2006)

I enjoyed Brokeback Mountain, and especially the performance of Heath Ledger. I don't know how many movies I've seen where the dialogue has to state, explicitly, something like: "if you keep bottling up your emotions like that, you're going to explode," but I've never seen someone act this concept as effectively as Ledger. At one point, when his emotions do blow up, it's hard to tell whether his appendix has ruptured or if he's merely trying not to cry. Overall, I agree with the positive comments about this movie's brilliant exploration of forbidden love and its patiently unfolding narrative.
The only thing that bothered me about the movie was what appeared to me a strange pop-psych assumption that two under-educated cowboys, faced with inarticulable emotions and an untenable situation would resort to violence to express themselves. The whole, "I'm loving you, so I'm punching you" thing seemed a little trite and unexamined. I mean, is this really the way that a macho gay man would express his love physically? Would he really be torn between whether to kiss his lover or break his nose? Maybe so, in which case I'm happy to withdraw my criticism. But I felt like this bordered on insulting, almost like saying that men are such brutal, emotional cripples that this is probably the only way for them to communicate complex feeling and inner confusion. I guess this would be a screenplay issue, or is this part of the Annie Proulx story? In any event, this is a fairly minor flaw, I think, in an otherwise solid film.