PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 12/9/05)

Given that the so-called mainstream media is often criticized for shoving a putatively progressive social agenda down the throats of God-fearing, sodomy-deploring Americans, the media scrutiny of Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain has provided an interesting counter to the argument that we debauched corrupters of the norm are unduly relaxed about homosexuality. I don’t normally feel bad for movie stars, but seeing Brokeback leads Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger bombarded with queries along the lines of “Ah-hur-hur, what was it like to kiss another guy, ah-hur-hur?” is a little dispiriting. I’m almost surprised nobody’s asked, “Did you two touch each other’s pee-pees?” But maybe I just haven’t seen that particular Entertainment Tonight episode yet.

Director Ang Lee, screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana (adapting, and greatly expanding on, a story by Annie Proulx), along with cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, composer Gustavo Santaolalla, an incredibly talented cast led by Ledger, Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams, and Anne Hathaway . . . hell, everybody involved in Brokeback Mountain deserves credit for crafting a film strong enough to withstand all of the third-grade snickering that’s attended it. Their actual achievement is far more substantial indeed. This story of a couple of cowboys who make an unexpectedly deep connection while working a lonesome job on the movie’s titular peak is one of the few truly convincing movies about romantic love to come along in years. And make no mistake—although the movie starts off in the early ’60s, and much is made of their insatiable hunger for each other as the two men separate, start families, and grapple over the years with their places in the straight world, this is not a social-issue tract. It’s a movie about romantic love, the most Romantic kind of romantic love—the kind you can never grasp long enough to even be vaguely satisfied by.

Lee and company handle the particulars of the tale with the requisite meticulousness and exquisite taste that marks all the director’s films. But, as Lee showed in The Ice Storm, for him discretion does not equal evasion. There’s no wiggle room as far as the situation Gyllenhaal’s Jack Twist and Ledger’s Ennis Del Mar find themselves in—they are lovers, not two guys who got a little chilly on a long Rocky Mountain evening. I’d go so far as to say that this magnificent picture confronts its subject matter head-on, but I don’t want to provide anybody with a laugh line. —Glenn Kenny