So... let's call this "Brokeback Weekend" in Seattle.
It's one of those things that will pass by most folks without much notice during this season of multiple holidays. But it's a big deal to film fans, and to some others as well, since the year's
most-honored movie, which has already been displayed on local screens in special performances, opens for its regular run at both The Egyption and Harvard Exit theaters.
The P-I and Times both give a much-used picture of the film's two hunk-stars the most prominent position on their page-top teaser boxes in this morning's editions. Inside, the critics for both papers join the chorus in praising director Ang Lee's film.
The Time's
Moira Macdonald calls Brokeback Mountain "an epic love story told in few words".
She elaborates:
Lee fills his film with long, waiting silences, punctuated by the endless horizontal lines of the Wyoming and Texas plains. And he gives his actors room to work small miracles of character.
...
The emotional impact of "Brokeback Mountain" is all the more stunning for its quietness. Little that's dramatic happens onscreen, and its central image couldn't be more prosaic: two worn-soft western shirts, hanging together. But Lee, a master of yearning, has created a classic and heartbreaking love story that won't be easily forgotten.
All of that makes it sound pretty much like the several other great "chick-flick" love-story movies that come out each year. But William Arnold's review in the PI starts with, and can't ever quite move away from the issue that is making this movie a bigger deal than it would otherwise be: "[I]t's by far the most uncompromising and unapologetic gay-themed drama ever made for a wide release by a major Hollywood studio with name stars."
Arnold, too, mostly praises the film, once he manages to move away from his preoccupation with the specifics of its love story.
Director Lee ... gives the script all the skill, sensitivity and shrewd originality that made him the art-house phenomenon of the '90s.
The movie does have one flaw: It doesn't have that one powerful scene of all great movie love stories in which we glimpse what the lovers give each other emotionally or intellectually: the nonsexual element of the bond. So we have to assume the attraction is entirely physical.
Yet, though this seems a serious oversight, the script otherwise sparkles with deeply human moments, unexpected revelations of character and the kind of laidback western authenticity that could only come from co-screenwriter Larry McMurtry ("Lonesome Dove," "Hud").
So that's what the big deal is: Even though this is the story of two men from a time and place (starting in the 60s in Wyoming) when the word and concept of "gay themed" would be meaningless, it's being called a "gay cowboy" movie -- both for good and bad.
A "gay critic" for MSNBC suggests seven rules for "straight dudes" who are compelled to see the film by their girlfriends, including, "6. Anne Hathaway, who plays [Jack?s] wife, gets topless. The End."
The Stranger's editor coyly suggests
This Friday night's must-have accessory for the line outside the Egyptian Theater: Brokeback Mountain's buttfucker-blue hankie. Worn in the back right-hand pocket, you're getting the popcorn; worn in the left, you're giving it.
But several more rational critics, including Rick Groen of the [Toronto] Globe and Mail, point out that contradictions of identity and labels are central to the film's theme:
When a pair of cowboys bond a little too closely, their love is simultaneously a brave testament to the tradition of rugged individualism and a shocking violation of the rules set down by the group. The passion they feel is a force of nature, and yet socially "unnatural." So, looking into their own hearts, the two come face to face with the paradox at the heart of the cowboy myth -- they have reached that dark point where freedom is rubbed raw in the harness, where to stay true to each other is to betray the many.
Annie Proulx, the author of the short story on which the movie is based said in an interview with AP that the two main characters, Jack and Ennis, probably wouldn't much like the movie:
The only people who would have problems with it are people who are very insecure about themselves and their own sexuality and who would be putting up a defense, and that's usually young men who haven't figured things out yet. Jack and Ennis would probably have trouble with this movie.
Slate's David Leavitt asks, "Is Brokeback Mountain, as it's been touted, Hollywood's first gay love story?"
He concludes that the film is, indeed, a love story but not a gay love story.
Does the fact that none of the principals involved in Brokeback Mountain is openly gay have anything to do with the film's happy resistance to the stale clichés of gay cinema? Perhaps. In any case, McMurtry, Ossana, and Lee deserve as much credit for their tenacity (it took them seven years to get the movie made) as for the skill with which they've translated Proulx's spare, bleak story into a film with an epic sweep that nonetheless manages to be affectingly idiosyncratic in its portrayal of two men in love. In the end, Brokeback Mountain is less the story of a love that dares not speak its name than of one that doesn't know how to speak its name, and is somehow more eloquent for its lack of vocabulary.
So... Maybe those "straight dudes" can comfort themselves with one more rule in addition to those offered by MSNBC: It's not really a gay love affair.
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