Brokeback Mountain Photo

Brokeback Mountain

Starring: Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Randy Quaid, Anne Hathaway, Kate Mara

RS: 4of 4 Stars

2006

Here come the rush-released and rereleased post-Oscar DVDs. While hot-button hype can account for the Best Picture win for the superficially deep Crash (just out in a two-disc director's-cut edition), no amount of statuettes, spoilers or sensationalism can prepare you for the profoundly moving experience that is Brokeback Mountain. "You may be a sinner, but I ain't yet had the opportunity," Ennis Del Mar (a stunning Heath Ledger) tells fellow uneducated small-towner Jack Twist (the just-as-studly Jake Gyllenhaal). It's the summer of 1963, and the two young men are set to work, alone but together, guarding sheep in the Wyoming wilderness. Thus begins a twenty-year tale of what it means when that most macho American archetype -- the cowboy -- collides with flesh-and-blood reality. Director Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) is a poet pure and simple; his wide-eyed depiction of the American West makes Brokeback an unqualified success as a nature film alone. Yet it's as a love story that the film strikes deepest, in the process illuminating the mystery of how what goes on between two people can never be fully understood by anyone else.