This film should have won best picture !

Rating: 10/10 (17 March 2006)

No other motion picture has ever moved me the way this one did because of so many similarities in my own life as experienced by one character or the other.
My partner was from Northern Colorado. We spent some time there. I could empathize with the feelings of the characters. "Men don't touch other men out here," my partner told me.
A strange phenomena was, since, I'm sorry to say, I'd never seen any movie with any of the four main characters in them, I "met" them on screen for the first time. Though I know it was "only a movie," I felt as if it was a carefully produced documentary, in particular, of these two men. Even though I had seen them on the Oprah show, that vision evaporated and I left the theater as if I'd seen two REAL people suffering those gut-wrenching experiences.
I had heard different reports about the film, but I had no idea what I was "walking into." The scene when Jack is pulling away from the trailer, leaving Ennis behind, I was sure the truck would stop and in the distance, be seen by Ennis turning around with the next words uttered being, "Get your ass in this truck and lets get out of here." But when he continued to roll out of sight, Uh Oh, I knew this wasn't going to be a Mary Popping flick.
And because my partner died twelve and a half years ago, and though not living in a trailer, my existence is somewhat similar; Ennis Del Mar is still living in that bleak lonely environment and I feel for him.