Best Picture of the Year

Rating: 10/10 (5 January 2006)

The nights are cold and lonely in the mountains of Wyoming. Two isolated cowboys stumble across a way to take the chill off as "Brokeback Mountain" gently unfolds into an epic, heartbreaking love story that's far greater than the sum of its parts.
Even while director Ang Lee's magnificent achievement is being reduced to the catchphrase "the gay cowboy movie," "Brokeback" is also about the classic American journey and what we've lost along the way, including our diminishing bond with this great land of ours.
It's 1963, and two Marlboro men who barely grunt hello apply for a temp job herding sheep. Rodeo rider Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) and rugged, Gary Cooper-ish ranch hand Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) are so flat broke that Brokeback is their only option - a thankless job for two with a pup tent for one, and no one to keep them warm.
Except each other.
Ennis, who speaks few words, conveys plenty. He's been brought up to believe men don't go with men, a lesson reinforced by something horrible he witnessed in his youth.
But the nights are cold, the whiskey hot. After an unplanned, energetic tumble with Jack in the pup tent, satisfying a need as primal as that for food, Ennis uses up some of his precious supply of mumbled words: "I ain't queer, ya know." Maybe, maybe not. What these two feel is eternal and nameless - even they don't know what it is (although the more adventurous Jack has an inkling). The closest Ennis gets to acknowledging his feelings is when he doubles over and wretches.
Brokeback gets them good, as Ennis later remarks.
The landscape is vast (it was filmed in Canada), but the neighbors' minds are narrow. So the cowboys go their separate ways, marry and have kids, and lead lives of quiet desperation despite a few quickie reunions back where it all started.
Jack and Ennis are victims of their time, and not just sexually. They're cowboys, that iconic figure of American history, but they could well be the last ones, their skills and rough edges increasingly useless in the modern world.
The persistent ache in this movie comes from thwarted desire. Forget the sex (and the sex scenes are decorous). The great tragedy is that they leave everything they value back on Brokeback. Ennis trades in the great outdoors for an airless apartment over a laundromat. Jack gives up bucking broncos for motorized farm equipment.
Thematically, the movie - adapted from a story by Annie Proulx - fits right in with the upcoming "The New World," in which the bond between Pocahontas and Capt. John Smith is likewise rooted in a shared love of a wild, unruly, rapidly disappearing landscape.
Jack and Ennis' feelings transcend anything as mundane as sexual orientation. In fact, the sexiest moment is when Jack doesn't peek as Ennis strips down to wash just yards away.
Gyllenhaal is terrific, as are Michelle Williams as Ennis' crushed, bitter wife, and Anne Hathaway as Jack's coldly oblivious one.
But the movie belongs to Ledger, who turns in an astonishing, Oscar-worthy performance as a man who knows he's drowning but won't swim. His words choke in his throat from fear of what they might express.
Like many of Ang Lee's films ("Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon"), this one drips with longing - in this case, for a vanished breed of man, for the vanished wilderness, and for a pure kind of love that has no label and needs no justification.