Le secret de Brokeback Mountain

For all of those who are holding back from watching this movie because it is "gay" or has love scenes between two men...oh! This movie has nothing to do with sex...and to be honest, I don't feel that it has much to do with homosexuality. This is the most beautiful and profoundly sad love story I have ever come across, and the fact that it is a love between two men is beside the point. It's about a love between two people who cannot be together, but if human beings were better at being human, and if the world was a better place, they would have lived out their lives side by side. I was so, so moved. AMAZING!!!! A must see.

I didn't know what to really expect going into this movie. I saw it a few months ago after all the awards hoopla. Generally a cynic, I have to say I was taken completely by surprise. The movie is very slow moving compared to most major movies nowadays. At the beginning I wondered if I would be able to stand sitting through all of it. However, it became completely enthralling. I really was drawn into the characters of Ennis and Jack. Heath Ledger's acting was superb. It's rare to empathize so deeply with a character in movies these days, like you do with Ennis. The cinematography was beautiful. Seeing it on the big screen I really felt I was sitting on the Wyoming mountain watching them. This is one of those movies you want to continue watching forever, and are sad when it ends.

I didn't believe for a moment that the film could live up to the hype, or to some of the comments posted here, some of them read like love letters to the film, to the director and the actors. Well, now, after seeing the film, I feel like writing a love letter myself. The film took over my senses and transported me. The tragedy that envelopes the lives of Ennis and Jack is caused by an ancestral ignorance that is part of our DNA and if you don't believe me read some of the hateful comments posted here alongside the love letters. That's the heart of the matter. After the summer in Brokeback Mountain, Ennis and Jack go their separate ways and Ennis hits a wall with his fists crying, trying to destroy his longing, self loathing, guilt, horror. Imagine in a world without ignorance and therefore without hatred, Ennis and Jack could have celebrated their love and attempt an honest life together. Imagine also if things were the other way and heterosexuals were the dark minority, imagine falling in love with a girl and having to keep it secret, never been able to tell or to show publicly your love for her. Men like Ennis, and there are many, have to curve their own emotions and conform, entering and developing unhappy marriages and why? Read some of the comments here and you'll understand why. There is one that condemns the movie and what the movie may do for his kid and his vision of cowboys without actually having seen the movie! That's the heart of the matter. I will go and see the film again tomorrow, if I can get tickets, I'm taking with me a group of people that hate the movie already without having seen it. I won a bet so they will have to. I'm taking them to diner later to talk. I intend to report the results if you let me. But for the time being let me tell you, "Brokeback Mountain" is an extraordinary film. Jake Gyllenhaal, Ann Hathaway and the magnificent Michelle Williams give superb performances but it's Heath Ledger's film. He gives us something that nobody could possibly have expected because what he gives us is not only, honest and moving and powerful but totally and utterly new.

I've always admired this film to a certain extent, but I think the thing that always kept me from loving it was that it never resonated with me emotionally. I would get attached while watching it, but all of those feelings would leave me fairly soon afterward. It had been about five years since I'd seen the film, and in that time I have grown up a lot, fallen in love, had my heart ripped to shreds and fallen back in love again and I think this growth personally has really opened me up to a place in my mind and heart to embrace this film more than most other screen romances that exist. Almost immediately it hit me harder than it had before and after a day since I watched it, the pain and heartache I experienced during it still remains at my core.

It's a love film told non-traditionally, but not because it's two men, that doesn't even factor into the depiction of it. It's nontraditional because it's two people fighting against the love and it's accuracy in this is startling. How there are times where you can hate the person you love, hate so many things about them and hate that you are in love with them, but you can't give it up at all. You can't walk away from it because it's like an addiction and I think this film more than any before it captures that remarkably.

A lot of this lies in the writing, but of course the performances from Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal certainly play a key factor in capturing it. Their characters take the love in different forms, Ennis fighting himself over it and Jack fighting the world because of it, but both actors capture exactly what they need to and bring this magnetism that really sparks. Gyllenhaal's openness is beautiful, his determination to make the love work and to just exist the way he wants to, he definitely provides the emotional anchor for the film and gives a heartbreaking portrayal.

It's Ledger, of course, who steals the show though, with a kind of transcendent performance that we're treated to maybe once a decade. He becomes this character in such a vivid way that you don't even recognize the actor inside the role anymore. Gyllenhaal is Jack and hits the surface notes expertly, but you can still see Jake Gyllenhaal in there. Heath Ledger is completely gone and from the very beginning of the film we have Ennis and we have him until the very end. This character is an incredibly difficult one to take on, he could have easily been someone who was hard to like or sympathize with due to his internalizing and his refusal to fully embrace the relationship and who he is, but that's what makes it hit even harder, thanks to Ledger's brutal work.

You see the pain in this person living a lie in every moment we have with him, with that turned in mouth and speech pattern that always sounds like it's hurting him to let anything out because he's afraid of how people are going to react. It's a performance unlike any other out there and in the end it's one that brings me to my knees. "Jack, I swear," was always a line that floored me when I was watching it but now it's at a point where just thinking of the line and the way that Ledger delivers it brings some water to my eyes.

I love this movie. Really love it. Haunting score, stunning cinematography, gripping performances, timeless tale--everything. People quibble about non-essentials. I'm female, middle-aged, hetero, and I defy you to tell me that the average straight guy is any more expressive than Ennis or any less needy than Jack. Or the average gal, either, straight or gay. Deeper than their sex, their sexuality, their religious, educational, economic or historic backgrounds, Jack and Ennis are two human beings living in the world as they find it--beautiful and indifferent at best, and as they find themselves--beautiful and flawed at best. Desire is desire. The desire for warmth, for connection, for any echo at all in the vastness of time and space, is shared by every human being ever to have lived. For me, the issue is not how repressed or thwarted Ennis and Jack are, but how persistently they turn toward the light, despite all impediment. Brokeback Mountain lyrically retells a story thousands of years old: loss and grief are unavoidable; love is where you find it.