Review of Brokeback Mountain

by Roger Baldwin

The great, humanitarian director Ang Lee's generously-realized Brokeback Mountain, as visualized through Rodrigo Prieto's commanding cinematography, captures the expansive skies and hills and flatlands of ranching and rodeo country—first to spread them out as open spaces of liberation for two men to indulge hidden love, and then to rein them in as confining prisons as the two are forced to conceal their desires and subsequently live lies of quiet desperation. As with Hillary Swank's gender-bent Brandon Teena in Boys Don't Cry, Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) inhabit enemy territory, the mythic individualism of the West is betrayed by the realities of small-town, rural conformity. Their frantic, same-time-next-year trysts among the icy rivers and thick forests of the Rockies and Southwest sands risk discovery, humiliation and execution. Brokeback's wilderness exteriors parallel the barren, deeply-lonely interiors of two men who have found little fortune in life except for the poor fortune of having discovered each other—the one bit of providence that might entitle them to a small parcel of genuine happiness is an accident that dooms them from square one. Ledger is remarkable as an inarticulate mountain man, capable of expressing his boiling emotions only through a clenched and stunted, simmering silence. As the narrative plays out across three decades, it transforms a gay-themed movie into a transcendent and timeless love story and, in the process, grinds into your bones as few movies do.

Read about Brokeback Mountain in the Internet Movie Database

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