"Brokeback Mountain": beautiful NYT review

NYT: Riding the High Country, Finding and Losing Love
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: December 9, 2005


Kimberley French/Focus Features
Jake Gyllenhaal, left, and Heath Ledger in "Brokeback Mountain."



THE lonesome chill that seeps through Ang Lee's epic western, "Brokeback Mountain," is as bone deep as the movie's heartbreaking story of two cowboys who fall in love almost by accident. It is embedded in the craggy landscape where their idyll begins and ends. It creeps into the farthest corners of the wide-open spaces they share with coyotes, bears and herds of sheep and rises like a stifled cry into the big, empty sky that stretches beyond the horizon.

One night, when their campfire dies, and the biting cold drives them to huddle together in a bedroll, a sudden spark between Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) flares into an undying flame.

The same mood of acute desolation permeates the spare, gnarly prose of Annie Proulx's short story, first published in The New Yorker in 1997, adapted by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. Mr. McMurtry knows about loneliness. Its ache suffused his novel and his screenplay for "The Last Picture Show," made into a film 34 years ago by Peter Bogdanovich....

***

This moving and majestic film would be a landmark if only because it is the first Hollywood movie to unmask the homoerotic strain in American culture that Leslie Fiedler discerned in his notorious 1948 Partisan Review essay, "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey." Fiedler characterized the bond between Huckleberry Finn and Jim, a runaway slave, as an unconscious romantic attachment shared by two males of different races as they flee the more constraining and civilizing domain of women. He went on to identify that bond as a recurrent theme in American literature.

In popular culture, Fiedler's Freudianism certainly could be applied to the Lone Ranger and Tonto. Minus the ethnic division, it might also be widened to include a long line of westerns and buddy movies, from "Red River" to "Midnight Cowboy" to "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid": the pure male bonding that dare not explore its shadow side....


http://movies2.nytimes.com/2005/12/09/movies/09brok.html?incamp=article_popular_3

Good literal and historical presentation by the writer

This movie is shaking the tree. It'll probably bring out the best -and worst- in alot of people.

Thanks for posting

Good post.

There was a great synopsis of the early reaction to the movie in Newsweek magazine, discussion groups after early previews. Peoples' perceptions were changed.

The director had some interesting comments--like,hetero men (I'm one) may be uncomfortable with the subject matter, but he was counting on alot of wives and moms to see the show

the people that don't see it will remain clouded in the ignorance that fuels their prejudice

I haven't been to a movie theater since Forrest Gump, what 11 years? I'm gonna see this show though

Here's a thread I started the other day. It has a link to the original short story. A heartbreaking read. Cheers!

:toast:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=5550301

Even if I don't get around to watching the movie itself, I think those who do are going to be in for a real cinematic treat. It's amazing that a story that short can so colorfully depict a 20-year saga of love, heartbreak, secrecy, and strife.

Thanks for that link to the short story, I was looking for it.

A "coming out" of sorts. We don't go to movies often either. Saw Fahrenhite 9/11 last yeat on July 4th. Before that, it was Will Smith in "Independence Day" and Richard Gere in "Pretty Woman" (We were paid to see the last two!-We don't get out a lot)

I can't wait to see it. Willie Nelson's song is heart-wrenching....