BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN
The lonesome West.
Running time: 134 minutes. Rated R (sex, nudity, profanity, some violence). At the Lincoln Square, the Chelsea, the Loews Village.
A love story is a machine for keeping two people apart, and you can't argue with the idea that there are problems in store for two men who begin a romance while herding sheep in 1963 Wyoming. "Brokeback Mountain" is a machine that works.
It works well enough that you wish it would work perfectly instead of gradually getting gummed up with melodrama. This is one of the best serious films about homosexuality ever made, but though it's sad and sobering it's still only a rough draft of a great movie.
Ennis (Heath Ledger) and Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal) are two cowboys - sheepboys, actually - who take a job protecting a flock against the wolves of summer on Brokeback Mountain. They joke around and graduate to playful shoving matches. Then one cold morning Jack makes a move and Ennis stops shoving back. The sex scene that follows is fairly graphic, and director Ang Lee ("Sense and Sensibility," "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon") must know that he could have tripled his audience by trimming 60 seconds. But the scene is there, and if it will make some viewers uncomfortable it also plants us firmly in reality.
That's why it's a surprise when the film first hints it's heading for the most obvious, unsubtle ending and then goes there. Jack and Ennis agree to forget what happened and part for four years, during which time each takes a wife and becomes a father. Jack's wife, Lureen (Anne Hathaway), is never developed; whether she's in rodeo togs or buried under a pile of fake blond hair, she's a look, not a character.
The writing is often eloquent in its spareness, but you don't expect one of America's greatest authors, Larry McMurtry, who co-wrote the script with Diana Ossana, to illustrate a lovers' quarrel with Garth Brooks lines like, "I wish I knew how to quit you." If any situation calls for implying rather than saying, it's the desperate one between these two tortured men.
The film's finest moments are largely to the credit of Ledger. Ducking from the world under the brim of his hat, Ennis pulls his head like a turtle and speaks as though he's being charged by the word. He's a man worn down by the constant, crushing burden of being someone he is not.
Despite his efforts to be there for his daughters and his wife (a touching Michelle Williams), some combination of shame and longing turns him into an angry, even violent man. He keeps getting in bloody fights not because people suspect he's gay but because he needs to punch somebody. Another girl tries to connect with him but is forced to give up. "I was probably no fun anyhow," he says, having long since given up on himself. The craggy, aching voice Ledger does is in itself enough to make this one of the year's great performances.
Ledger is an actor who didn't work as a poster boy, but Gyllenhaal is nearly the opposite. He's goofy and callow in the early scenes, but even as the character ages 20 years and Gyllenhaal dials down the antics, he never seems like an adult. If anything, the smudgy mustache he wears as a supposedly 40-year-old man makes him look about 15, and his voice remains a boy's.
"Brokeback Mountain" will rightly be praised for trying to make an honest assessment of the emotional wreckage done to men and women by the closeting of homosexuality. That idea is so powerful and so little explored on screen that it's bound to be revisited in a more complete film in the future.
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