Gayxploitation and boring like hell

Rating: 4/10 (30 January 2006)

Brainstorming session at Focus Features. Someone comes up with the gay cowboy novel she's read. Someone else thinks it's a good idea and gives the green light. The birth of a failure.
Apart from gay love not been such a shocking idea anymore, the movie turns out to be unbelievably boring. How could it not be so when the only reason for making it was to show two gay cowboys on screen. Did we need over two hours for that? Two slow, painful hours?
The direction and the photography are classy, but there is nothing else. At best, there is something, an exact copy of a secret heterosexual romance with the predictable pinch of social outcry. So this is why I call it a "gayxploitation" movie.
The "Oscar worthy" performances? Heath Ledger is good but not special and his smoking/spitting thing is rather annoying (okay you desperately want to look genuine, we got it), while Jake Gyllenhaal is miscast. Come on, can you see him as a cowboy? The mustache at the end is so fake that compares only to Johnny Depp's at Donnie Brasco.
I'm afraid this is gonna end up just like Dances With Wolves and Beautiful Mind. A bad film that the Academy's political correctness elevates to unworthy heights.