just another love story

It seems like I ought to have an opinion on Brokeback Mountain, so here it is. S and I went to see it last night in Chelsea and predictably every type of homosexual couple was in attendance: preppy gays, muscle-bound Chelsea boys, overweight middle-agers, Gaysians, over-fifties each reading their individual copies of HX magazine (turned to the back pages which advertise escort services), skinny Ivy-league types (that was us). BM had been on the radar screen of the gay community for years but it seemed to hit the mainstream media like a bitzkrieg about three weeks ago and it has emerged rapidly as the movie of the year, ensuring (along with Capote and TransAmerica) that we'll all have a gay old time at the Academy Awards this year.

Each pair of gay men in the audience (and they were mostly in pairs) seemed to want something different out of this film -- they wanted to be turned on by two hot pin-up boys making out, they wanted to have their lives reflected back on the big screen, they wanted to see their political agenda advanced, they wanted to finally be embraced by that town so beloved by the gay community which has also so excluded us: Hollywood. As for me, what I really was hoping for was the pure aesthetic pleasure of seeing another expert cinematic exploration of director Ang Lee's favorite subject: repression and release. My expectations were only partly rewarded.

Despire all of our desires being pitched up their on the screen, I concluded by the end of the film that whatever the gay community thought about BM matters very little. The significant response will most likely come from straight viewers in middle America, people who have never heard of Beautiful Thing or Yossi & Jagger and the countless other gay love stories that have abounded in indie cinema in recent decades. BM is not groundbreaking for its treatment of homosexual love; the story of young men falling in love and coming to terms with their sexuality has been told time and again in the very movies that helped nerdy cinephilic young men of my generation find a language to express our repressed longings. What's significant is the end of ghettoization that this movie represents, the bid for mainstream status. This is, after all, a movie in which one major Hollywood heartthrob is shown sodomizing another.

BM is significant, too, I think, in that it is not an "issue movie," like Philadelphia -- a movie in which the gay characters were so sanitized, saintly and generalized that they ceased to be characters. This is not a movie that has any argument to make about AIDS or gay-bashing or gay marriage, though the last two topics are certainly relevant to the story. It's not about those issues any more than Terms of Endearment was about cancer. No, this is a gay love story, just like any other Hollywood love story -- from Gone With the Wind to The English Patient -- in which the protagonists are passionate, tortured, selfish, at times hurtful and we are meant to weep big tears.

So, if it must be judged by that standard, let me admit that I cried (my boyfriend would add that I cried more than he did). Ang Lee has a way with tension (I've read that he looks at each film as a sort of Taoist mixture of yin and yang) and there are amazing sequences where he, abetted by a fantastic, completely natural performance from Heath Ledger, really unleashes the floodgates. Lee has turned his talent for unobstrusively precise and balanced photogrpahic composition to a new terrain (the American West), having already shown us his take on Restoration England, American suburbia, and feudal China. The film makes its strongest claims for true "art" status in the first hour or so, when the boys are up on Brokeback Mountain. The introduction of the characters and the situation is spare, nothing is extraneous. There is a minimum of musical scoring, a minimum of words. The tilt of every stetson emphasizes the constricting masculine roles these men have been forced to play, even as the natural beauty of the background urges them to let loose.

The balance, hoewever, doesn't hold. The film is flawed (not fatally, but seriously) by some infelicitous casting and production choices. Jake Gyllenhal is no match for Heath Ledger; his Jack Twist is supposed to be more open and eager, but Gyllenhal overplays every moment to the degree that the viewer is often embarrassed for him, we are always acutely conscious of the effect he's going for. He also looks about as comfortable as I would in boots and a ten-gallon hat. Unfortunately, his whole plotline is hampered by other details that clank unharmoniously with the picture as a whole. Ann Hathaway is forced to wear hideous wigs (apparently in an effort to match the ridiculousness of Gyllenhal's moustache) as the characters age; their domestic drama has none of the gravitas of Ledger's parallel story.

The last third of the movie is weighed down with plot and the whole tone of the picture seems less assured. These men can only be themselves, of course, when they are up on Brokeback Mountain (just as Newland Archer and Ellen Olenska in The Age of Innocence or Francesca and Robert in The Bridges of Madison County must mask their love when they are under the watchful stare of the civilized world), but the movie itself starts to feel as constricted as its characters. Lee doesn't seem to know where his emotional releases are -- we get a big one on their final fishing trip, when Ledger tells Gyllenhal that (even after all these years) he can't run away and live with him. Lee elegantly cuts to a shot of their younger selves, easy and comfortable, holding one another, and the effect is powerful. The demoument that follows, involving death and remorse and mourning, takes too long to play out and (for the most part) left this viewer emotionally cold.

There are other quibbles to make with the film, especially with the handling of the protagonists' wives. Michelle Williams' pain is shown, but that's about it -- she only seems to suffer, not to have any independent life -- whereas Hathaway is blithe and apparently accepting from the start of the romantic emptiness of her sham marriage. I'm glad that in one of the most gorgeously romantic shots of the movie (as Ledger runs down the steps of his house to see Gylenhall for the first time in four years and cannot prevent himself from passionately kissing and craessing him) also shows us the betrayal felt by Williams as she witnesses it from the sidelines. But we can't really feel for her because we are never let into her psyche. Having shown us the smallest piece of these women's lives, they are pretty much side-tracked.

In short, I don't think Brokeback Mountain (considered in its totality) is the greatest love story ever told. It's not even the greatest movie Ang Lee has made (try Sense and Sensibility or, if you want a gay storyline, The Wedding Banquet). Like his characters, Lee seems at home with the sheep but when he's back in civilization his story falters. Clint Eastwood's Madison County is, for my money, a more elegantly realized and moving depiction of love stifled by small-town mores. But, of course, that film didn't have the inflammatory political baggage of BM. It's trying to do an awful lot of things at once -- to harness the power of classic Hollywood tropes of masculinity and romance, even as it asks us to reconsider them. (For a typically insightful analysis of the cinematic historical context of the film, see the invaluable Mahnola Dargis in the New York Times.)

This movie is the first mainstream attempt to tell a gay love story with charcters who are not emblems but roles, to apply all the Hollywood gloss and glamor and heartstring-pulling to the lives of men who profess to love other men. If it doesn't fully succeed, perhaps all we can say is, let there be more attempts.