Brokeback Mountain
Jan. 8th, 2006 10:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hawkwing_lbBrokeback Mountain is not a love story.
It's a film about loneliness.
And it's a film about place. And about what it is to be human.
It's a film that says a lot with its silences. In the aching spaces between words. In things that are never said at all. Only implied.
Implications. It has a lot of those.
Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhall) and Ennis DelMar (Heath Ledger) are two young cowboys who discover they love each other in the course of a summer herding sheep on Brokeback Mountain. But it's 1960s Wyoming, and neither their society nor, in my impression, their own upbringing, will let them be together. Over the next twenty years they do their best to deal with the enormity of their love and its effects on their lives.
It's art. Art at its highest form. There is so much in this film, and it is extraordinarily well acted. Heath Ledger is particularly good. He is Ennis, a closed fist of a man, inarticulate, his words monsyllables wrapped around so much in implication and emotion -
It's sheer laziness to call this a gay cowboy film. It isn't. It's the closest I've ever seen a film get to being a film about being human.
It's a film about place. And loneliness. And regret. And a host of unspoken might-have-been-but-isn't. And family. And place. And loneliness.
And everything else that goes along with being human, in the silences where there are no words that can ever be spoken. In spaces freighted with significance.
It's a film about loneliness.
And it's a film about place. And about what it is to be human.
It's a film that says a lot with its silences. In the aching spaces between words. In things that are never said at all. Only implied.
Implications. It has a lot of those.
Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhall) and Ennis DelMar (Heath Ledger) are two young cowboys who discover they love each other in the course of a summer herding sheep on Brokeback Mountain. But it's 1960s Wyoming, and neither their society nor, in my impression, their own upbringing, will let them be together. Over the next twenty years they do their best to deal with the enormity of their love and its effects on their lives.
It's art. Art at its highest form. There is so much in this film, and it is extraordinarily well acted. Heath Ledger is particularly good. He is Ennis, a closed fist of a man, inarticulate, his words monsyllables wrapped around so much in implication and emotion -
It's sheer laziness to call this a gay cowboy film. It isn't. It's the closest I've ever seen a film get to being a film about being human.
It's a film about place. And loneliness. And regret. And a host of unspoken might-have-been-but-isn't. And family. And place. And loneliness.
And everything else that goes along with being human, in the silences where there are no words that can ever be spoken. In spaces freighted with significance.
