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 don't think it reduces the story in the least if Ennis was either a) bisexual, or b) so damn good at repressing that he couldn't not be with women because, hey, that's what he's supposed to do. It fits their respective personalities: Jack is the dreamer, but he's also the active one. If he can't get it here, he will there, and he'll keep going until he finds it. Ennis is the one who won't go back, won't go forward, and it's only in the light of Jack, who pushes him, that he makes any movements at all. I think it said something quite loud & clear that the one time we see Ennis with his wife, he flips her over on her stomach. That said something to me, at least.

Although I often dislike the notion that one must be either hetero or homo in one's sexuality, and bisexuality is just dismissed out of hand as indecisiveness, the fact that Lee's not pushing an agenda makes that whole issue sort of fall by the wayside. Ennis, and Jack, are able to be fully complex with a handful of contradictory elements because that's how people really are. Maybe what makes this more of a "this is the American midwest" rather than the usual "oh, look, a NY decorator" is because the latter is so often not just a stereotype, but one without any attendent complexities. We need cardboard for good comedy; depth tends to ruin the joke -- and Lee's movie, and his treatment, is meant to be anything but a joke.

Which reminds me of the fact that when I saw it with Mikkeneko, there was one person in the theater who kept laughing (if somewhat curtly) at all the wrong parts. It was highly annoying, but at the same time, I sort of felt bad for someone so uncomfortable that laughter was the only possible response. After all, we often laugh at something that makes us so discomforted the only other reaction could be frustrated or miserable tears, but still, to hear the entire theater inhale on a single breath when Jack and Ennis meet again after four years -- and then this one person laugh in the back... it annoyed me. Sigh.