A Beautiful Movie

Rating: 9/10 (19 February 2006)

I went to Brokeback Mountain feeling slightly apprehensive about the whole thing. I wasn't sure what to expect, and I wasn't sure if I'd like it, I just knew that a film that was garnering so much critical praise and public attention and controversy was a film that needed to be seen.
I left the theatre feeling a mixture of anguish, praise for the movie, and half guilt for how homosexuals are treated in our world today.
Now first, let me start by reviewing the movie itself, regardless of the fact that there are two gay cowboys in it. It was a breathtakingly beautiful film, I swear, every new view of Brokeback Mountain or the fields and forests surrounding it took my breath away with their encompassing grandeur. Excellent cinematography, unquestionably. Very very well done.
The acting was quite a high point, as well. Jack Twist's and Ennis Del Mar's wives played their roles to perfection, Ennis's wive a confused soul when she finds out her husband is having an affair - with a gay man at that - and Jack's b****y wife who really couldn't give less of a darn that Jack sneaks away up to the mountains to go "fishing" several times a year. Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhall were the perfect choices for this film - and they both played their anguish so well I could almost physically feel the pain they were going through. The way they show the connection and love they have with each other is unbelievably good. The way the story seamlessly panned twenty years was very well done too. You could see a very clear difference in each of their characters between the beginning of the movie and the end of the movie.
Now for the part about how the main characters are gay. I'm not really against gay people in general, but what I didn't like about the movie was the way the main characters cheated on their wives, and how it was presented as mostly acceptable, simply because they're in love. True, it would have been unbelievably difficult for them to not have an affair once they found out their feelings for each other, but the way their affair breaks Ennis's wife's heart broke my heart as well. The fact that the community around them would have most likely killed them if they found out, too, was another heartbreaking point in the movie, and how even Jack Twist himself is killed because people find out he is gay.
On the whole, no matter who you are, this is a movie you should see. It is a heartbreaking, beautiful, painful, wonderfully acted and beautifully filmed masterpiece.