Where seldom is heard a discouraging word.
Virgin cellphones have an optional feature, one you'll wish you had, perhaps, for New Year's Eve-it prevents "drunk dialing," à la Miles in
Sideways
, so you don't wake up in the morning with even more regrets than you started out with the night before. It might also be something to turn on before you watch
Brokeback Mountain
-because if your experience is anything like the Screener's, you'll walk out of the theater with a burning desire to accost someone, anyone, with breast-beating avowals of undying love.
***image3***For behold, screenwriting team McMurtry and Ossana (adapting Annie Proulx's story) have achieved the gape-worthy: They've actually succeeded in making something new under Hollywood's world-weary sun. While Westerns have always been homoerotic (almost a tautology of the genre), never has
Lonesome Dove
merged so honestly and so meltingly with, say,
Maurice
. Add the lyrical direction of Ang Lee (
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
) and the story almost dissolves like sugar in the rain, yielding its essentially mythic core-an old-fashioned big-screen romance, which only incidentally happens to be between two men.
Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) meet one summer when they pair up to watch a herd of sheep, work even cowboys find boring and lonely, particularly when stuck on a mountain in Montana (
vide
the title) where the only entertainment is Jack's harmonica and Ennis' campfire cooking (variations on the theme of pork 'n' beans). Jack is a rodeo charmer, as playful and sensual as Ennis is laconic and introverted. Soon both men find themselves struggling to ignore the obvious; without putting too fine a point on it, they fall in love, the way young people do. They fall in love with one another's beauty, and with their own capacity for tenderness when alone together in Arcadia.
This being 20th-century America and not Greek pastoral poetry, their idyll can't and doesn't last-if it were Ovid, they would turn into trees, but as it is, they must descend and return to the world of male distance, of marrying women and fathering children, of relegating their physical passion for one another, which does not diminish with time, into a precious few encounters ***image1*** masquerading as annual good-ol'-boy fishing trips. Yet even this charmed state of affairs can't continue indefinitely; ultimately, the agonizing repercussions of one's fearful renunciation of the other reverberate through the remainder of the film, a tragic denial of self.
If we said anything bad about Ledger earlier this year, based on his performance in
The Brothers Grimm,
we take it back and then some: His work here is nothing short of star-making, whether despite or because of the fact that, as he freely admits, he has no training in acting. His inarticulate fluency recalls Brando or even James Dean; Ledger manages to cast an aura of negative space around himself, and it's mesmerizing.
If one had to find fault with
Brokeback
, the rebuke would go to Lee, whose delicacy (e.g.,
Sense and Sensibility
) can be cloying. Yet he's also the only director at once sufficiently daring and sufficiently populist to take on such a project and land it safely amidst the uneasy demographic of homophobic middlebrow America. And how safely has it landed? Per screen,
Brokeback
averaged $13,000 over the holiday weekend to
King Kong
's $9,000-ride 'em, cowboys.
