This tragic and powerful love story will haunt you

Rating: 9/10 (27 March 2013)

This film is about love lost for the sake of keeping up appearances that, in the end, just makes everyone involved miserable. Ennis and Jack are two young men who spend the summer of 1963 herding sheep in Wyoming on an isolated mountain. Ennis is the strong silent type in the Gary Cooper tradition, while Jack is more outgoing. During the two months they are together they become friends and then lovers. Had the time and place been different, they would have probably stayed together, based on the powerful scene in which they go their separate ways after that first summer. However, with the culture being that of the rugged mountain west and the time that of the early sixties, this was an impossibility. The reaction of their boss and Ennis' wife when they discover what is going on tells you what they could have looked forward to if they had been open about their relationship - muted ostracism by daylight, perhaps violence come nightfall. At first, the two just try to put their feelings for each other behind them. Ennis, already engaged, goes through with his marriage as planned and fathers two daughters. Jack goes back to Texas, meets and marries the daughter of a wealthy farm equipment dealer, and fathers a son. Four years after their initial separation, Jack returns to Wyoming and their relationship picks up where it left off - still a secret, this time on the pretext of week-long "fishing trips" they take two or three times a year for the next fifteen years, never able to tell anyone about their love, never able to show their affection in public. Many have mentioned that the two were just cheating on their wives all of this time, but the fact is if they had been able to follow their hearts, they would have never had wives to begin with.
Much of what is great about this film is what is left unsaid. Is Ennis actually homosexual or did he just fall in love with someone who happened to be a man? Did Jack die the way his wife said he did or he way Ennis imagined? Did Jack lie to Ennis that last time they were together and say he was having an affair with a woman because he knew Ennis would be jealous of another man but not another woman? Did Jack deliberately take Ennis' shirt as a reminder of him that first summer or did he just find it and decide to keep it? The acting is tremendous, and I find myself mourning the tragedy of the characters in this film as though they were real people, although I'm sure their situation represents many real ones past and present. This is a beautiful and thoughtful film that definitely should have won the Best Picture Oscar. Jack and Ennis' double lives just leave themselves, their wives, and everyone else who is close to them feeling empty and just add up to time and opportunity lost. Only the unwritten rules of society and conformity come out the winner in this one.