Gay cowboys eating pudding

Rating: 3/10 (29 December 2005)

WARNING! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS NUMEROUS SPOILERS!
"Catwoman." "Xandau." "The Apple." "Pootie Tang." What do all of these films have in common? They're all about as entertaining as "Brokeback Mountain", a lead balloon of a message movie undone by its own good intentions and its own sense of cinematic entitlement.
Based on the short story by Annie Proulx, "Brokeback" concerns two ranch-hands, the improbably named Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger), who meet as young men while both are sheep-herding on Wyoming's Brokeback Mountain. The two develop a close relationship, culminating in a fumbling night of intimacy during a cold snap. After their job ends, the two part ways, each marrying a woman and fathering children: Jack marries well-to-do rodeo girl Lureen (Anne Hathaway) while Ennis marries down-to-earth Alma (Michelle Williams). Both men, however, continue to hold onto their memories of Brokeback, until the day they finally meet again and begin a secret relationship thinly disguised as a series of fishing trips. The film chronicles the two men as their secret slowly destroys their marriages and threatens to consume them from within. Much angst ensues.
"Brokeback" is a film of substitutions: a collection of mannerisms substituting for characterization, a series of landscape shots substituting for direction, an assemblage of country-fried aphorisms substituting for a script, rampant and unrestrained melodrama substituting for human emotion. The largest share of the blame for the film lies with director Ang Lee, a man who could probably make very vivid wilderness films but who rarely knows what to do with the humans caught in his frame. Lee's direction is ridiculously dull and ponderous, each scene moving with a slow, aimless gait into the next with no forward momentum or dramatic pull. To be sure, some of Lee's footage is gorgeous even while its lack of realism proves distracting: the moon over Wyoming is always big and full, the top of the mountain is always pristine, and the small towns of the film are always picture-perfect in aping what Lee believes they should look like. Diana Ossana and Larry McMurty's script doesn't help matters at all. The words don't so much advance the "plot", for lack of a better word, as much as they intermittently nudge it down a lazy river.
But that doesn't leave the actors in the clear. Much attention has been paid to the two male leads, especially Ledger, for their performances, but the praise comes not so much from the performances themselves as from what they represent. Like Charlize Theron in "Monster", few critics believed Ledger was capable of performing such a role, while both men are seen as "bold" or "daring" for playing ostensibly gay men. The caliber of the performances no longer matters at this point: the quickest way to an Oscar nomination is to play gay, handicapped, or a prostitute. But the praise is misplaced. Certainly, both men are giving heartfelt performances, and both fully believe in the film, but Ledger decides to mumble most of his words to the point of making half of his lines unintelligible, while Gyllenhaal comes off simply as trying to act too much. He's endearingly artificial. The only characters who appear as natural, genuine human beings are the two female leads. Williams has a few very difficult, emotionally raw scenes that she pulls off remarkably well. Hathaway is better-than-expected as a woman who decides to drown her marital ennui in a Tammy Faye-esquire swirl of bleached hair, gaudy jewelry, and taloned fingernails.
The argument has been advanced, and never more enthusiastically than by the producers of the film, that this is not a "gay cowboy movie", but a "universal" love story. But this is not a "gay" movie. Jack and Ennis never identify as gay or consider themselves to be gay men. None of the lead actors are gay. None of the main talent behind the scenes is gay. This is a film by, to, and packaged for self-gratifying heterosexuals, brimming with a well-intentioned but ultimately patronizing, stultifying view of gays and their relationships that typifies the Hollywood penchant for sacrificing structure, story, and quality in order to advance a viewpoint that the filmmakers have little (if any) familiarity with. I should point out at this time that I am a gay man, but the attitude presented in Brokeback insults me. Jack and Ennis' relationship is presented as the purest of all the relationships between all of the characters of the film, despite the fact that the word "love" never escapes their lips once during the film. Anyone who criticizes them for any reason is automatically a bigot, even as the two men's selfishness not only brings misery and unhappiness to both their families, but ultimately proves to be their undoing. Jack, while desperately seeking the constant companionship Ennis denies him, is gay-bashed to death, graphically, with a tire iron to his face. Sadly, it is the only appropriate end for this antiquated, "Children's Hour"-style take on those quaint little homosexuals. On the other hand, given the amount of effort everyone involved in the film has put into making all of these characters so uniformly miserable, a happy ending would have been ludicrously fake.
30 seconds of poorly-filmed sex and a few make-out sessions is not enough to call yourself a "bold" or "courageous" film. The fact that this is essentially a Harlequin-style doomed romance that happens to feature two men in the leading roles doesn't excuse the horde of clichÃ©s marching across the screen. Perhaps I'm old-fashioned, but I firmly believe that just because you want your movie to be important doesn't mean you have to make it skull-crushingly boring.
On an episode of South Park, Eric Cartman states that all independent cinema consists of is "gay cowboys eating pudding." Leave it to Hollywood to prove him right. 3 out of 10.