Another long movie from a short story

Rating: 6/10 (23 May 2008)

Two gay cowboys conduct a long-distance affair over 20 years but fail to get it together or achieve much else in their lives.
Actually they're bisexual shepherds, but let's not quibble.
You can polish off the Proulx short story, write an essay about it and still have time to clean your house in the time Ang Lee takes to bring this one into harbour. It even manages to lumber on for half an hour after the major plot issue is resolved, but the story offers so little hope from the beginning that you've not exactly been on tenterhooks waiting for Ennis and Jack to elope to San Francisco.
They do age well though, probably better than I did during this epic. Ledger becomes a stockier Robert Redford, Gyllenhall into a more muscular John Waters. Sadly we'll never know how one of those guesses worked out in real life. Gyllenhaal is his usual revelatory self, every tic and muscle emanating conflict desire and emotion. Ledger, as the less self-aware character, has less to work with and plays every scene as though he had a sock stuffed in his mouth.
But it's still way too long: Proulx manages to cram a novel's worth of insights and epiphanies into 10,000 carefully chosen words. Lee seems to be making the film's length itself a statement of it's "seriousness" but even though it's a very close and probably over-respectful reading of the story, fails to add anything to it or even capture many of its nuances.