damn good review

[kaigou]

Daniel Mendelsohn gets it.

The real achievement of Brokeback Mountain is not that it tells a universal love story that happens to have gay characters in it, but that it tells a distinctively gay story that happens to be so well told that any feeling person can be moved by it. If you insist, as so many have, that the story of Jack and Ennis is OK to watch and sympathize with because they're not really homosexual—that they're more like the heart of America than like "gay people"—you're pushing them back into the closet whose narrow and suffocating confines Ang Lee and his collaborators have so beautifully and harrowingly exposed.

link via digsby's Hullabaloo.

Comments

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

I thought it was an exceedingly difficult movie, and not just because it was dealing with some intense issues. It really required that I work, as a viewer, and there were points -- even while watching -- that I did feel exhausted by it. Ang Lee's comedic stuff (which I so love) doesn't usually make me put out this much effort to track his details and the tiny little things just to get an idea of the big picture. Hell, I completely missed that Jack's mother smuggled Jack's ashes to Ennis. I wondered why there was a close-up shot, but by that point I was like: ugh, something else Lee is trying to tell me and I have no idea, still processing...

So no, I'm not surprised when anyone says they didn't like the movie for one reason or another. i don't think it was necessarily the most accessible movie, but in some ways, that's also what I like most about it. Oddly.