Stunning and Devastating - yes, but what is this film actually about?

Rating: 7/10 (26 February 2006)

**SPOILER WARNING**
While I suppose I can see the critical acclaim (especially here in Britain where the film has offered people a re-assuring alternative to the alarming legislative agenda of the Christian Right in America), I can't honestly say that I enjoyed "Brokeback Mountain." It came across as a lavishly filmed, two-hour public service announcement about the twin dangers of homophobic violence and repressed sexuality (and the relationship between the two) in the red States.
But the real problem with this film lies elsewhere, and I am surprised that no one has pointed it out. This isn't actually a love story. It is a period piece, but one that uses a mental model of male homosexuality that was current in, maybe, 1964. Ennis and Jack aren't presented so much as characters as psycho-pathologies: two emotionally crippled teen-aged boys. What little we learn about their background turns on their relationships with their respective fathers: for Jack, it's a story of rejection and disapproval; for Ennis, one of devastating loss. As Ennis admits, he hasn't spoken more than 10 words in the past year. What they discover, together, that summer at Brokeback Mountain, is the ability to feel. It's touching, for certain. After a frantic tumble, they start to thaw out. But they're also (understandably) confused and overwhelmed by their emotions and have no way to understand them. So for the next twenty years, they keep re-enacting the same primal scene on Brokeback Mountain. The NYTimes reviewer recalls Proulx's prose to make a somewhat different point: "What Jack remembered and craved in a way he could neither help nor understand was the time that distant summer on Brokeback when Ennis had come up behind him and pulled him close, the silent embrace satisfying some shared and sexless hunger."
And that's the problem. The central tragedy of the film isn't so much love denied as life denied. For various reasons (framed mostly as societal, but also Ennis' own traumatic childhood encounter with homophobic violence), they don't have an opportunity to find out if they really do want to spend their lives together. No surprise then that the first summer has the hold it does over their lives. But this isn't adult male homosexuality. And I am not sure it helps the gay rights movement to have people thinking it is.
This presentation of male homosexuality as a sanitized, hermetically-sealed adolescent experimentation is probably why - quite contrary to the predictions of Conservative pundits - people in places like Texas, Montana, Colorado and Wyoming are running off to see it. The story is sad, but it's not challenging. I suppose if it convinces a handful of people to discourage their neighbors and teenage sons from taking tire irons to other people's skulls, then it's probably not the worst film of 2005 by any stretch. It's just not half as thoughtful as it pretends, or all that penetrating.
The film loyally preserves the narrative voice of a character whose fragile emotional stability rests on a determined lack of self-understanding. Heath Ledger did a good job of conveying the emotional desolation. That part, at least, is compelling, and I hope he gets an Oscar for it.