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RED STATE HATE When the critics fell all over themselves for Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, some of us began to speculate honest opinion, and by extension the courage to express it, was in danger of ceasing as required component in reviews. The praise has been so excessive, the rush to bestow honors so lacking of restraint you wonder if the gay cabal in critics’ societies herniated while ejaculating all the congratulatory goo. (At IMDb, there are hundred of pages filled with thousands of comments with “moving,” “haunting,” “beautiful,” “touching” and “masterpiece” countlessly repeated.) Just what’s so groundbreaking about two men who discover they’re in love? Because they’re cowboys in straight jacket Wyoming? Perhaps the (embryonic) breakthrough is in what actor Jake Gyllenhaal said after being advised to read Will Fellows’ Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Upper Midwest: “I don’t think that these two characters even know what gay is.” This is the core, the conundrum if you will, of the movie. It is being played as if the characters haven’t much of a self-recognition of homosexuality, and definitely no knowledge of a gay lifestyle. But they’re aware of the shame society scorns on those who are gay—they try to hide the sex they enjoy with each other. Observers of male sexuality have long thought sex between men doesn’t necessarily mean they’re gay exclusively—the current vernacular of otherwise straight men having sex with other men is “down low”—and, according to a newly published study, it happens more often and in numbers larger than previously thought. Simple to explain: when circumstance provides opportunity, sex drives rev up. In Brokeback Mountain, a tent goes up and carnality soars and at first the annual interludes are without tentacles. (For a while it’s like a craggy “down low” of Same Time, Next Year.) Of course, no movie using Wyoming will suggest laissez faire, thus we get the hackneyed self-discoveries, the imperative dramatic tensions and this soaper has too many of the latter bordering on the poisonously sinister, though not inaccurate. (It’s impossible not to flash on Matthew Shepard’s fate.) A few good moments: Ledger’s little girl accidentally bumps into a huge display of glass jars and when his wife observes him kissing Gyllenhaal. (However, the first is unnecessary, which may be why I liked its inclusion, the second probably false in its intensity given place and time.) The two leads are never embarrassing, and Ledger delivers the end with dignity. Famous for having his assistants assemble reams of info about the periods he’s filming, Lee once more shows remarkable confidence in mimicking background gloss. As with The Ice Storm and Sense and Sensibility, there is no identifying sense of Lee here, nor a prevailing sensibility; he makes movies feeling like fiats from a collective. Text COPYRIGHT © 2007 RALPH BENNER All Rights Reserved.
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