painfully beautiful

Rating: 10/10 (18 January 2006)

The story is beautiful and romantic and yet heart wrenchingly sad at times. It's the sort of movie that remains in your thoughts for days afterwards. It's gentle and slow paced, rough around the edges, and the most beautiful Western I've ever seen.
Since the original work was a short story, there was no painful cutting process that goes along with whittling down a novel to a feature length film. The movie remains true to Annie Proulx's work and both movie and short story are powerful, high quality pieces of writing.
For those of you who are passing up this movie because you don't want to watch gay cowboy porn, please, please put aside your preconceived notions and go see the film. There are hardly any graphic shots and the story is beautiful.