A fine film, but a classic-to-be? Perhaps not.

Rating: 8/10 (5 February 2006)

Just before I saw the film today (02/06/06), a friend wrote to say:
"It's the funniest darn phenomenon. In Great Falls the letters to the editor have not been along the lines of 'take that dirty movie off the screen' but rather, 'How dare the critics think we are so provincial that we can't handle such a movie!' "
I'll share my reply, and add a further comment about the representation of "place."
"We got to "Brokeback Mountain" downtown this afternoon with our friends--half the price of the suburban multiplex. We all liked it, and there are some fine things in it. But my strongest reaction, even near the beginning, was, "This is a movie more to be admired than loved." It was two hours+ long--a risky thing, despite the pace being justified by the content, the screenplay, and the cinematography. It know it had to be slow-paced, but it seemed to struggle to get underway. Finally, though, it did get underway. The turning point for me was when Ennis's wife discovers what his friendship with Jack is about--there is finally a context, a community to be reckoned with (for the audience not least of all).
Another early reaction was to admire Heath Ledger's capacity to evoke Ennis's character, but somehow Gyllenhaal's performance crept up on me and in the end seemed the better achievement; but both were excellent.
A good film and some kind of landmark, but not a classic-to-be--that's what I think right now. But maybe I'm comparing it to the pathos of something like "Paris, Texas," which I saw twenty years ago and might not find as good now as I did then."
....And my observations about PLACE:
I recognized so many of the Alberta landscapes, and I know them to be so different from Wyoming landscapes, that I really think something important was overlooked about the photographic/cinematographic language of landscape, though I recognize that the heroic Canadian Rockies are a plausible metaphoric landscape for much of the story. One particular scene I thought to be poorly considered from the perspective of locale was one near the end where Ennis and Jack are parting. Any viewer could have noticed that they were in a parking lot that looked out over a not-quite-full reservoir (probably Upper Kananaskis "Lake")-- hardly the emotionally charged environs for a "Brokeback Mountain." Or am I supposed to read that "demoted" landscape as emblematic of something?
One more quibble: early in the film we see a zillion sheep spread improbably across a twenty-five degree alpine slope. I'm no shepherd, but I know that to actually get sheep up to a place like that would require a battalion of expert Basques (to say nothing of the environmental permissions), so instead we are treated (briefly) to budget special effects. In short, I'd have been happier with more attention given to concrete details like these.