Moving

Rating: 10/10 (22 October 2006)

The one and only reason to watch a movie is to being moved. To be moved out of your own reality into the reality of the characters but then again feeling strong resonance with your own life subconsciously. Brokeback Mountain is such a movie which touches the most hurting wounds in our lives: the wounds caused by missing a chance, by missing an opportunity to walk another path. These wounds hurt the most when the only reason to not have chosen the other path is our own fear. Fear is such a destructive emotion and mostly an amalgam of our childhood experiences, education and socialization. On the other hand, love can also be destructive but the combination of both as we see in BBM is truly tragic.
While Ennis is the fearsome guy it's Jack who always believes and hopes that one day their love will be stronger than Ennis' fears. But Ennis doesn't make a decision until it's too late.
Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal play these two characters and their love for each other in such a believable way that we are deeply touched. Yes, it is only a movie ... but we all know that must be many stories out there like the one between Ennis and Jack.
Ang Lee did a fantastic job here. He created a true epic, with epic landscapes, epic emotions and an epic time line. On the other hand BBM is a very intimate movie watching closely the expressions of the protagonists. The music fits perfectly. It's minimalistic, not at all sweeping strings like the ones of 'Out of Africa'. Just one small complaint: I wish Lee had filmed in Cinemascope just because of the great visuals in the mountains; I think this would have made the movie even stronger.
See this movie and you will hopefully see the world in a different light after watching it.