truth is beautiful, but it can hurt

Rating: 10/10 (18 March 2006)

Friends said Brokeback Mountain was a bit slow. From the start I knew I was in Mahler territory - a symphonic structure was unfolding on the screen. Like great music, this film lives outside time but is shaped by time. It stays with you, living in your soul.
I have always struggled to enjoy Romeo and Juliet. But in this great film I can at last feel a work is expressing and presenting with power, and in an inward way, the dreadful inexorable struggle between the individual person and the society he/she lives in. Ennis says if you can't fix it you gotta just stand it, and that is one of the most enraging, truthful, and bitterly fulfilling things one can say about this life. This is why, apart from its great visual and musical beauty, the film has such universal appeal, why teenagers and old men find it reaches into their being and stays there (I'm nearly 57, nearly twenty years on from Jack Twist when the story ends - hey, we're almost contemporaries!).
Hats off to the actors. The women carried a huge burden in this film and I cannot imagine stronger performances than Ann Hathaway and Michelle Williams gave. They both were in a situation, to use Jack's heavy word. Mr Ledger reminded me of Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind, finding ways to express the inexpressive. But Mr Ledger goes deeper.
The guts and feeling and truth and beauty are all there in Annie Proulx's short story masterpiece. The film is a great interpreter of the story and a masterpiece in its own right - like Guernica, like the Kindertotenlieder. Many thanks, Ang Lee and Larry McMurtrie and your colleagues.