Tom and I went to see Brokeback Mountain yesterday. What a haunting and
beautiful film! I haven't been mesmerized by a movie like that in a very
long time. We could not stop thinking about the characters and the
scenery and the painful love that they both shared.
It's only playing in one movie theater (the "artsy" one) here in Austin,
so it might not be playing near you if you live in a small town.
However, I can't recommend this movie strongly enough. It's rated R, but
the hetero sex scenes (plural) are more graphic than the one homo sex
scene. It's a beautiful and heart-breaking love story.

Here's an editorial from today's NYT that talks about it.

Two Gay Cowboys Hit a Home Run

By FRANK RICH
Published: December 18, 2005

WHAT if they held a culture war and no one fired a shot? That's the
compelling tale of "Brokeback Mountain." Here is a heavily promoted
American movie depicting two men having sex - the precise sex act that
was still a crime in some states until the Supreme Court struck down
sodomy laws just two and a half years ago - but there is no controversy,
no Fox News tar and feathering, no roar from the religious right.
"Brokeback Mountain" has instead become the unlikely Oscar favorite,
propelled by its bicoastal sweep of critics' awards, by its unexpected
dominance of the far less highfalutin Golden Globes and, perhaps most of
all, by the lure of a gold rush. Last weekend it opened to the highest
per-screen average of any movie this year.

Those screens were in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco - hardly
national bellwethers. But I'll rashly predict that the big Hollywood
question posed on the front page of The Los Angeles Times after those
stunning weekend grosses - "Can 'Brokeback Mountain' Move the
Heartland?" - will be answered with a resounding yes. All the signs of a
runaway phenomenon are present, from an instant parody on "Saturday
Night Live" to the report that a multiplex in Plano, Tex., sold more
advance tickets for the so-called "gay cowboy picture" than for "King
Kong." "The culture is finding us," James Schamus, the "Brokeback
Mountain" producer, told USA Today. "Grown-up movies have never had that
kind of per-screen average. You only get those numbers when you're
vacuuming up enormous interest from all walks of life."

In the packed theater where I caught "Brokeback Mountain," the trailers
included a National Guard recruitment spiel, and the audience was
demographically all over the map. The culture is seeking out this movie
not just because it is a powerful, four-hankie account of a doomed love
affair and is beautifully acted by everyone, starting with the riveting
Heath Ledger. The X factor is that the film delivers a story previously
untold by A-list Hollywood. It's a story America may be more than ready
to hear a year after its president cynically flogged a legally
superfluous (and unpassable) constitutional amendment banning same-sex
marriage for the sole purpose of whipping up the basest hostilities of
his electoral base.

By coincidence, "Brokeback Mountain," a movie that is all the more
subversive for having no overt politics, is a rebuke and antidote to
that sordid episode. Whether it proves a movie for the ages or as
transient as "Love Story," it is a landmark in the troubled history of
America's relationship to homosexuality. It brings something different
to the pop culture marketplace at just the pivotal moment to catch a wave.

Heaven knows there has been no shortage of gay-themed entertainment in
recent years. To the tedious point of ubiquity, gay characters, many of
them updated reincarnations of the stereotypical fops and fussbudgets of
1930's studio comedies, are at least as well represented as other
minorities in prime-time television. Entertainment Weekly has tallied
nine movies, including "Capote" and "Rent," with major gay characters
this year. But "Brokeback Mountain," besides being more sexually candid
than the norm, is not set in urban America, is not comic or camp, and,
unlike the breakout dramas "Philadelphia" and "Angels in America," is
pre-AIDS.

Its heroes are neither midnight cowboys, drugstore cowboys nor Village
People cowboys. As Annie Proulx writes in the brilliant short story from
which the movie has been adapted, the two ranch hands, Ennis Del Mar
(Mr. Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), are instead simply "high
school dropout country boys with no prospects, brought up to hard work
and privation, both rough-mannered, rough-spoken, inured to the stoic life."

They meet and fall in love while tending sheep in the Wyoming wilderness
in 1963. That was the year of Martin Luther King Jr.'s march on
Washington and Betty Friedan's "Feminine Mystique," but gay Americans,
and not just in Wyoming, were stranded, still waiting for the world to
start spinning forward. Over the next two decades of sporadic reunions
and long separations, both Ennis and Jack get married and have children;
it barely occurs to them to do otherwise. In their place and time, there
is no vocabulary to articulate their internal conflicts, no path to
steer their story to a happily-ever-after Hollywood ending. Before they
know it, they are, in Ms. Proulx's words, "no longer young men with all
of it before them."

Ennis's and Jack's acute emotions - yearning, loneliness,
disappointment, loss, love and, yes, lust - are affecting because they
are universal. But while the screenplay, by Larry McMurtry and Diana
Ossana, adheres closely to the Proulx original, it even more vividly
roots the movie in the rural all-American milieu, with its forlorn
honky-tonks and small-town Fourth of July picnics, familiar from elegiac
McMurtry works like "The Last Picture Show." More crucially, the script
adds detail to Ennis's and Jack's wives (as do Michelle Williams and
Anne Hathaway, who play them) so that we can implicitly, and without any
on-screen moralizing, see the cost inflicted on entire families, not
just on Ennis and Jack, when gay people must live a lie.

Though "Brokeback Mountain" is not a western, it's been directed by Ang
Lee with the austerity and languorous gait of a John Ford epic. These
aesthetics couldn't be more country miles removed from "The Birdcage" or
"Will & Grace." The audience is forced to recognize that gay people were
fixtures in the red state of Wyoming (and every other corner of the
country, too) long before Matthew Shepard and Mary Cheney were born.
Without a single polemical speech, this laconic film dramatizes
homosexuality as an inherent and immutable identity, rather than some
aberrant and elective "agenda" concocted by conspiratorial "elites" in
Chelsea, the Castro and South Beach, as anti-gay proselytizers would
have it. Ennis and Jack long for a life together, not for what gay
baiters pejoratively label a "lifestyle."

But in truth the audience doesn't have to be coerced to get it. This is
where the country has been steadily moving of late. "Brokeback
Mountain," a Hollywood product after all, is not leading a revolution
but ratifying one, fleshing out - quite literally - what most Americans
now believe. It's not for nothing that the proposed constitutional ban
on same-sex marriage vanished as soon as the election was over. Polls
show that a large American majority support equal rights for gay couples
as long as the unions aren't labeled "marriage" - and given the current
swift pace of change, that reservation, too, will probably fade in the
next 5 to 10 years.

The history of "Brokeback Mountain" as a film project in itself
crystallizes how fast the climate has shifted. Mr. McMurtry and Ms.
Ossana bought the screen rights to the Proulx story after it was
published in The New Yorker in 1997. That was the same year the
religious right declared a fatwa on Disney because Ellen DeGeneres came
out of the closet in her ABC prime-time sitcom. In the eight years it
took "Brokeback Mountain" to overcome Hollywood's shilly-shallying and
at last be made, the Disney boycott collapsed and Ms. DeGeneres's star
rose. She's now a mainstream daytime talk-show host competing with
Oprah. No one has forgotten she's a lesbian. No one cares.

ANOTHER startling snapshot of this progress can be found in a
culture-war skirmish that unfolded just as "Brokeback Mountain" was
arriving at the multiplex. The American Family Association of Tupelo,
Miss., a leader in the 1997 anti-"Ellen" crusade, claimed this month
that its threat of a boycott had led Ford to stop advertising its Jaguar
and Land Rover lines in glossy gay magazines. Last week Ford, under fire
from gay civil-rights organizations and no doubt many other mainstream
customers, essentially told the would-be boycotters to get lost by
publicly announcing that it would not only resume its Jaguar and Land
Rover ads in gay publications, but advertise other brands in them as well.

As far as I can tell, the only blowhard in the country to turn up on
television to declare culture war on "Brokeback Mountain" also has an
affiliation with the American Family Association. By contrast, as Salon
reported last week, other family-values ayatollahs have made a conscious
decision to ignore the movie, lest they drum up ticket sales by turning
it into a SpongeBob SquarePants cause célèbre. Robert Knight of
Concerned Women for America imagined that the film might just go away if
he and his peers stayed mum. Audiences "don't want to see two guys going
at it," he told Salon. "It's that simple."

So he might wish. The truth is that the millions of moviegoers soon to
swoon over the star-crossed gay cowboys of "Brokeback Mountain" can
probably put up with the sight of "two guys going at it." It's the all
too American tragedy of what happens to these men afterward that neither
our hearts nor consciences can so easily shake.