April 6, 2006
A Movie I Missed
If you’ve read this blog for a while you’ll know that I have been in the process of catching up on movies I’ve missed during the past several years. On the New Release shelf of one of the video stores I frequest, I saw one I had heard about at Oscar time last year but knew no details of, and had forgotten about. I rented Brokeback Mountain.
Beautifully filmed against the sweeping mountain vistas of Wyoming, I was almost put to sleep during the first half hour. Lots of staring and seemingly inconsequential, lethargic conversation between the film’s centerpieces, two drifters who were hired to tend sheep on Brokeback Mountain one August in the 1960’s. Their exchanges begin to pick up and shockingly, to me at least, they begin making heated love one night under the stars. I then realized that this was a love story . . . of two cowboys.
Heath Ledger is absolutely brilliant as the simple, yet complicated, Ennis, haunted by the childhood memory of a gay-bashing murder he was made to witness as a child by his father. Jake Gyllenhaal, with his boyish looks, plays Jack, a somewhat more worldly rodeo cowboy. Both are bewildered by the mutual passion they have been plagued with in their redneck world.
The award-winning epic slowly rolls through the next few emotionally charged decades painting a poignant picture of angst, unfulfilled desire and unrequited love as they live their lives apart from one another, each marrying and having children, to meet up every few years for a “fishing trip” at familiar, and breathtaking higher elevations. Counterpoint was the dusty, dirty streets of the small Texas town where Ennis lived out his dual existence.
Perhaps purposely so, was the unclarity as to how Jack met his final demise. Was it the flat tire story that his widow recounted or was it a repeat of the hate crime that was foreshadowed by Ennis throughout the film?
Brokeback Mountain is a restrained movie that fills the senses, tugs at the heart and I recommend it as a must-see.
Rick
Filed under: General Ramblings, Movies that Moved Me
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