Touted as Hollywood's first openly gay Western, director Ang Lee's cautious adaptation of Annie Proulx's acclaimed New Yorker tale features relatively little guy-on-guy action (there's far more same-sex spit swapped in DUDE, WHERE'S MY CAR?), and it isn't much of a Western, either. Sensitively embellished by screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, it's a melodramatic weepie set on the lonesome prairie, more THE WAY WE WERE in denim drag than THE LUSTY MEN in chaps. Affable Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) and tight-lipped Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) first meet as young men in the summer of 1963, when they're hired to herd sheep on Wyoming's Brokeback Mountain. Jack and Ennis are soon sharing more than campfire songs when, one frosty night, they unexpectedly become lovers. Ennis assures Jack that "he's not no queer" and rejects Jack's idealistic plan to get their own ranch together; Ennis knows that kind of ranching could get a man killed. When the threat of a coming snowstorm puts a sudden end to their summer idyll, Ennis and Jack pack up their feelings with their gear and go their separate ways. Four years later they meet again, and Ennis is married to Alma (an excellent Michelle Williams) and struggling to raise two little girls. After a failed shot at rodeo stardom, Jack has settled down with Lureen (Anne Hathaway), the pampered daughter of a successful Texas farm-equipment dealer. Within moments of their reunion, Jack and Ennis are in each other's arms for a reckless, unmistakably sexual embrace that Alma accidentally witnesses. Understandably shocked, she says nothing, not even when Ennis and Jack take off for the first in what turns out to be a long series of semiregular romantic getaways in the Wyoming mountains. Constrained by both homophobia and the lies they tell themselves and each other, Jack and Ennis' attempts to recapture the power of that summer on Brokeback Mountain are all they have, and nothing so vulnerable can last forever. While Gyllenhaal is a competent actor, Ledger — surprisingly enough — is becoming a great one, and the levels of intensity they bring to their roles render this romantically star-crossed relationship emotionally lopsided. But it's not without power. Lee's film says unequivocally to straight audiences that it's in everyone's best interest for gay couples to live openly and safely (though anyone who feels otherwise probably won't be seeing BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN), while gay viewers get to identify with a pair of major Hollywood stars, even as they're being served a painful object lesson: Haters will hate you no matter whose rules you live by, so you might as well live by your own. --Ken Fox
