‘Bred Crumbs

Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain has no flying martial artists or badly realized green CGI freaks. Not coincidentally, it’s his first great movie in a while.

Brokeback comes off as Lee’s best film since The Ice Storm. (Assuming that Ride with the Devil was nothing to write home about. I didn’t see it but, come on. Jewel.) Both films are subtle, patient, deliberate studies in repression. But where The Ice Storm was dark and creepy, Brokeback is simultaneously inspiring and heart-crushingly sad. I can’t remember the last time I heard quite so many choked sobs from an audience during closing credits.

Brokeback brings Lee back to .500. He has scored with this, The Ice Storm and the early light romp The Wedding Banquet to offset his big stumbles, Hulk (which I didn’t see all of, but I saw more than too much of) and the overrated Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (one-third imagination and intrigue, followed by one-third romantic tedium and one-third acrobatic pointlessness).

Note the absence of fantastic elements in the winners. The only thing that blows the theory is Sense and Sensibility, which, being kept at a human scale, should have worked. Maybe the presence of Hugh Grant was enough to ruin it. That aside, Lee is at his best when he’s letting realistic, closely examined lives play out, in any period. Brokeback Mountain takes its sweet Wyoming (but filmed in Canada and New Mexico) time, and is all the better for it. (And the whole "gay cowboy" tag is a misnomer. Technically, they’re gay sheepboys.)

Heath Ledger (who acts with his hunched spine and a mumble that occasionally approaches Boomhauer levels) and Jake Gyllenhaal (expertly wielding do-anything-for-me eyes), play two men whose only truth is their love for each other, even as they deny the implications of that to different degrees. Their struggle to own up to their feelings amid their society and surroundings hits home, as does the crushing impact of their lies on the women they pretend to love. For those of us lucky enough to live in a time and place where we can love and/or lust honestly, the hard beauty of Brokeback Mountain reminds us to count our blessings, and steels us for the rising onslaught, still abetted by too many bystanders, of the ignorant "righteous" hypocrites who live to destroy us.