Sorry gang. We all want to like this movie, but it really stinks.

Rating: 4/10 (26 March 2006)

Evidently the producers thought that the shocking idea of homosexuality on the range was itself so powerful that it didn't need any of the other trappings of narrative film-making -- plot, character development, motivation. The time scheme is so poorly delineated -- and the age makeup for the two hunkettes so timid -- that the only way to tell what's going on is by figuring out how old their kids are. The two actors try their best, with Ledger putting in the funniest mumble performance this side of Benecio del Toro. But pretty much the rest is cliché, especially Michelle Williams' noble anger a la Jennifer Connelly. How did Ang Lee, so deft and comic in WEDDING BANQUET, become pompous so quickly? In Frank Oz's messy but still insightful IN & OUT, Matt Dillon plays a good-hearted narcissist who wins an Oscar for playing a gay solider. The film clips that we see at the film's Oscar Awards (brilliantly introduced by an uproariously fatuous Glenn Close) are suitably self-congratulatory (and hilarious). Give Brokeback Mountain a few years, and Larry McMurtry's script will seem as unintentionally idiotic as Paul Rudnick's was intentionally so.