Good, but overrated

Rating: Null/10 (12 February 2006)

It was impossible to not have heard any hype about this film, so seeing it with no expectations was difficult. I had heard comments running the spectrum from the film being leftist propaganda to it being a cinematic masterpiece. I found neither to be true. I found the film to be intensely specific, focusing on only these two men in only this time and place. The story itself was nothing new - a forbidden love affair - only given a bit of a twist involving gay men. Ang Lee's direction is competent and precise, lacking the visual flair of his "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and giving the film a cold, almost objective look. The technical aspects of the film are well-done, from the spectacular cinematography to the haunting score. From a purely technical standpoint, the film is great, a study in location shooting.
However, it is in the artistic merits that I found the film its weakest. The writing is minimalism defined, and long passages with no dialogue are commonplace in the opening act. Unfortunately, and oddly, these passages have nothing to do with the relationship between the characters and more to do with sheep. When the characters speak, it is always in terse, pithy statements about beans and fishing. When they have sex for the first time, they are drunk, and it seems to come more from a desire for something - anything - to break the monotony than an actual attraction towards each other. With better actors, such an approach would have worked. Neither Heath Ledger nor Jake Gyllenhaal have the maturity and presence to make an unspoken attraction work, and they have an uneasy, almost forced chemistry (perhaps due to the fact that both are straight men). Ledger resorts to bland, self-conscious mumblings and Gyllenhaal swings recklessly into melodrama in his later scenes. Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway do what they can with tremendously underwritten roles, each appearing on screen for maybe ten or fifteen minutes of the bloated 134-minute runtime. The biggest failure in the film is that no one appears to age, and I spent the majority of the time wondering if scenes were consecutively appearing, or if years had passed, since I was given no other indication of the passage of time (the story covers two decades). In a later scene, when a middle-aged Ledger talks to his adult daughter, they look exactly the same age.
I've come to find that people are very knee-jerk in their reactions to the film. It's either the best movie ever made, or a worthless piece of junk. It's hardly revolutionary, since "Dog Day Afternoon" featured a gay bank robber stealing to finance his boyfriend's sex change operation, and gay themes have been prevalent in dozens of films before "Brokeback". This film is, instead, an accomplished production, a twist on an old story, and less-than-perfect performances from decent (but not yet great) actors in an undernourished screenplay. It's good, worth seeing, but it's no masterpiece.