Brokeback Mountain

My friends and I like to joke that the upcoming movie, Brokeback Mountain, the 20 year story or two gay cowboys who fall in love, should be called Bareback Mountain. But from the reviews I've read so far, this movie is anything but a joke. It won the top prize at the Venice film festival, and already critics are whispering the sweet nothings of Oscar nominations. Here's what one critic, from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram (a decidedly red state) wrote about the film's showing in Toronto:

You come north looking for a masterpiece -- or, at the very least, a movie to shake you out of your doldrums and punch you straight in the gut. At this year's Toronto Film Festival, you didn't have to wait long to find one.

Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain, an adaptation of a short story by Annie Proulx set to hit theaters in December, is the director's best work since The Ice Storm-- quite possibly his best work period. It tells the story of two young ranch hands (Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger) who fall in love while working together in Wyoming in the early 1960s. For the next two decades, they carry on a fervent but utterly impossible long-distance romance, trying to keep their passions hidden from their wives. The movie is cut from the same cloth as Brief Encounter or An Affair To Remember, an inconsolably sad drama about two lovers driven apart by circumstance. But Lee has never displayed such raw emotion and power; this movie is a fierce howl of anguish from a director who all too often drowns in his own propriety.

Brokeback Mountain screened here Friday, and it instantly became the most-buzzed-about title of the festival. The feeling seems to be that Lee and the shockingly good Heath Ledger are locks for Oscar nominations. (Over the weekend, it also won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival.) But as Lee's fortunes soared, another brand-name director found his crashing and burning...

PS. If you haven't seen Ice Storm (referenced above) I HIGHLY recommend it. It's one of those movies that, when it ends, you just kinda sit there with your jaw open.