The Sad Laments of Laconic and Lonely Lovers

Rating: 9/10 (5 October 2006)

I have been up to Brokeback about six times now (the film has a way of popping up in different countries I visit and with each viewing I discover new elements inside Ang Lee's clean-hearted take on Annie Proulx rich, iconic characters.
Each time I meet these people I find new and subtle aspects in their open, cotton comfortable performances. This group made a great team. All the performers deliver the goods, especially the women, who are a real backbone and counter-arch to the film's heartbreaking love story and they perform best in the small places that reveal the accumulative frustration from all the existential angles Lee focuses his eye on.
We feel sympathy and love for all of them. Compassion for all of them, right down to poor Ennis Del Mar's post-marriage fling, Linda Cardellini's, Cassie. In love with quiet withdrawn broke-hearted Ennis.
The long, delicate climb into the heart of the film begins with the spiritual union of these two mountain herding men, Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist up on Brokeback Mountain one long summer ago. Two men absolutely singular in character as they are opposite in natures. Both trying to understand their other selves and the object of this sudden desire, need and want for the other man. Not an easy item on the menu for Wyoming 1963 and this tear in the painting shatters us from within little by little. It is a doomed affair from the horse kick.
But we are roped into the tale and allowed to watch it unfold casually, in rhythm with the naturalistic tone of the world it inhabits. A world of open skies, space, mountains and rivers. Lee invites us to visit unobtrusively yet intimately that we may discover, slowly, gently, purposefully overhear and watch his little population of two cowboys, moving among the sheep, clouds, dusty roads and freshet streams on horseback and sometimes crawling into the tiniest of places in the human heart.
Rodrigo Prieto has shot a clean well-captured landscape. Each tableau a luminous and engulfing mise en scene. His camera places these individual's lives in the context of their size, the size of their longing, to the Great Immensity of the Northwestern territory of Wyoming. Though we know Brokeback was shot in Alberta, in the Canadian Rockies, the camera captures the timeless eternity and the empty solitude between these character's inner souls and their external realities within the period (mid 1963) and the context of their love to the landscapes they inhabit together and apart.
The film feels natural and real. Relaxed in its boots.
There are minor things that hurt the film, the visual make up to indicate the character's aging for one, looked pretty obvious and distracted. But the performances outdo any flaw every time. The thing is, every time you get up there to Brokeback it tears your heart open as well as Annie's story did before it and that in itself speaks volumes.