Life’s good on (for?) ‘Brokeback Mountain’

I received the following e-mail from Spokane reader Nathan Weinbender , a junior at Lewis and Clark High School who makes occasional guest appearances on “Movies 101,” the radio show that I’m a part of for Spokane Public Radio . It involves Ang Lee ‘s new film, “Brokeback Mountain.”

Dan:

I read on your blog that you were seeing “Brokeback Mountain.” So what’d you think of it? I was blown away by it, and it’s moved to the top of my list as the best film of 2005. What a hell of a movie.

– Nathan Weinbender

Nathan:

I think that it’s one of the saddest films I’ve ever seen (nearly as sad, in a different way, as the Iranian film “Children of Heaven” ). It’s wonderfully filmed, beautifully acted (by both the leads, at least), and it marks another passage in American film: two A-list actors kissing and making love, brutally and hungrily, for the first time.

I think a lot of commentators have done the movie a disservice by calling it the “gay cowboy” movie . Such labeling leads to limited viewpoints. And the thing is, the film is as much about the desperation and frustration surrounding a forbidden love, and the consequent pain and loneliness involved with the impossibility of that love, as it is a story of two young saddle tramps falling in love.

Not everyone accepts this point of view. A gay friend of mine, in fact, hated the film. He called it, “Stereotypical, flaccid, boring. You could cast a woman in Jake G.’s role and leave the part almost unchanged, taking it the last tiny step towards heterosexual Harlequin romance . A straight love story acted by men: perfect for fag hags .”

That, of course, is his opinion. And since he lives the life that Ennis was afraid to enter into (in Montana, of all places), his feelings can’t be dismissed. But as with any good attempt at art, “Brokeback Mountain” speaks to a lot of different audiences.

And while I agree that it may misrepresent gay love, I don’t think it misrepresents love in and of itself. But I’m not sure it fails even to capture all gay love. My brother, who also is gay, said the movie worked for him. “Lee succeeds in putting a particular moment of life under a microscope,” he said. In other words, the story was about these particular characters and their experience.

Whatever, I didn’t find it boring. I wish Lee had avoided the obvious link with Matthew Shepard at the film’s end. And as time passes, I’ll be curious to see just how well “Brokeback Mountain” bears up. But I did enjoy it. It would not have jumped to the top of my top 10 list – “ Crash ,” “ Good Night, and Good Luck ” and “ Munich ” still, I think, rank as the best that I saw last year. But it would have been up there somewhere.

– Dan

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Below : Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal star in Ang Lee’s adaptation of Annie Proulx’s short story “Brokeback Mountain.”

Focus Features publicity photo