Watch the trailer (at apple.com).
I have been told that I’m dead inside because I rarely cry during movies, even when a friend is sitting next to me while drying her eyes and sniffling into a used Kleenex. I can’t remember the last time I’ve shed a tear. I’m moved, sure, but moved to the point of tears? Not likely. That is until I saw Brokeback Mountain. This movie just about broke my heart.
Talkative Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) and taciturn Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) are two young cowboys who meet working as sheep ranchers one summer (in 1963 to be exact) up in Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming. The two fall into an easy friendship that soon turns into something else. I know, it sounds boring. Two cowboys up in the middle of nowhere in Wyoming: blah blah blah. But it’s anything but. I couldn’t tear my eyes off the screen for its entire two hour and 14 minute run time.
I would love to write about the story in depth, but I think that would ruin the film. Besides, I really wished they hadn’t already revealed the relationship between the two in the trailers. Instead of looking at the film simply as a love story, it will be dubbed a “gay movie”. The marketing team should have hidden the affair and have let people decide for themselves what kind of movie they thought it was.
Now there will be whole sections of potential audiences who will avoid Brokeback Mountain, and consequently, they will have missed out on one the best, most beautiful love stories I have ever seen unfold on screen. And I think that is exactly how the film should be viewed — as a poignantly touching and moving story about love and longing. It really doesn’t matter who’s doing the loving and what their gender is.
