COWBOYS NEVER AGE! (THE GAY ONES AT LEAST)

By: B -- 12/31/05

I know why you’re here. On the surface you want to know my thoughts on Ang Lee’s new film Brokeback Mountain… but deep down, at your core, all you want to know is the explicitness of the love scenes. I’ll get to it, promise.

But first, a summary: Brokeback Mountain is a western about two cowboys who meet in 1963 while working a summer job herding sheep on the Wyoming mountain. It’s a life of hard work, dust and solitude, of washing clothes in the river and eating beans over an open fire. In the midst of the tedious work the two men (Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal) start up a rough-and-tumble secret relationship. After the summer ends, the men start up proper lives, complete with children and wives. Life happens, and as time goes on the men attempt to deal with feelings that are too powerful to subside.

I’d expected a social commentary film about backwoods towns dealing with homosexuality, but Brokeback was only a love story. Between two cowboys. Take away the tension-slash-uniqueness of that bond and the story of Brokeback is actually quite bare. Thus, the attraction of the film is its subtle brilliance: Ledger’s tortured internal trauma playing Ennis, a cross between Billy Bob Thornton in Sling Blade and King of the Hill’s Boomhauer; the striking scenery and, more than anything, Lee’s ability to squeeze an engaging story out of just about nothing. It wasn’t my favorite of the year, but Lee’s storytelling is remarkable.

And now for the moment of truth: the love scenes in Brokeback are minimal, and brief. The film is 134 minutes long and I winced through a total of 4 of them. That’s it. And with its sights set on an Oscar, it was probably the best strategy.

POP RATING: 6

CRITICAL RATING: 8.5

B'S RATING: 8

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