One of the Saddest, Most Heart Breaking Romantic Movies Ever Filmed

Rating: 10/10 (19 December 2005)

"Brokeback Mountain" is one of the saddest, most heart breaking romantic movies ever made, without a drop of sentimentality or ounce of schmaltz.
Director Ang Lee has created a direct descendant of John Ford's seminal Westerns. While filmed in Alberta standing in for Wyoming, rather than Ford's usual Monument Valley, the gorgeous landscape (credit to Rodrigo Prieto's lovely cinematography) and endless horizon of isolation recalls a West where John Wayne tried to shoot Natalie Wood for transgressive fraternizing in "The Searchers" and the men of "My Darling Clementine," etc., were only free outdoors, beyond the confines of civilization. The camera adores the two handsome Marlboro Men at the center of the story from first shot, and throughout, as we see them draped over trucks, sheep, horses, campfires and each other.
Enlivened by terrific acting, Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana's screenplay adaptation of Annie Proulx's short story manages the difficult feat of communicating raw emotion through essentially inarticulate characters who first don't understand their feelings and then have no words to express them.
Jake Gyllenhaal is almost as adorable as "Jack Twist" as he was romancing Gwyneth Paltrow in "Proof." Even though his aging hair and make-up defeat him visually for a human saga that extends over 20 years (as well as Anne Hathaway's who literally ropes him into being her spouse), his growing maturity and self-realization is demonstrated to be hard-won. While we have seen the anxiety of the third leg of a triangle many times in stories of adultery or intermittently requited love, Gyllenhaal wears his passion, joy, hope, affection, longing and desperation on his face so transparently that the audience cannot help but be drawn into his palpable pain.
But Heath Ledger takes conflicted masculinity to a new level, in a way that "Jarhead" scrupulously avoided. As one of the aggressive women in their lives says in frustration as to why she's now with a new beau: "He even talks." Ledger's "Ennis Del Mar" drawls a concession of "Guess I wasn't much fun." Her tearful riposte: "Don't you understand that a woman doesn't fall in love with fun?" He creates a complete, taciturn, repressed, confused character from a hardscrabble life who tries to force himself to accept being fenced in by the strictures of Western expectations and codes of conduct towards both men and women. His character is totally overwhelmed when his feelings are unleashed and collide, and yet, can shine with exquisite tenderness in sweet romance. His performance leaves the audience exhausted in its pathos. While I've been a fan since his teen acting days, his brief scenes in "Monster's Ball" only hinted that he was capable of this depth. He embodies tortured loneliness who has to sacrifice too much to learn that no man is an island.
The film is movingly sensitive to the women in their lives and very sympathetic to the women being hornswoggled by adultery where they least expected it. Michelle Williams is a whirlwind as a naive girl who grows into an exhausted working mother suddenly faced with an explanation for the jarring disconnect in her marriage that will always be there through their shared children. (The men take seriously responsibility for procreative sex.) Her interactions with Ledger, in and out of bed, build to fraught climaxes.
The musical leitmotif of the central relationship is repeated operatically relentlessly. The country music jukebox selections are adequate (Tammy Wynette's "D-I-V-O-R-C-E" is a bit too obvious a choice), though the tracks on the soundtrack CD are beautiful but not apparent in the film. Over the credits, Willie Nelson croons a lovely take on Bobby Bare's traditional "He Was A Friend of Mine" that ironically segues into Rufus Wainwright's "The Maker Makes." And when I got home the first song that popped up on the radio was Aretha Frankin belting "I Never Loved A Man (The Way I Love You)" which seemed even more appropriate.