Brokeback Mountain was certainly pioneering in the persuasive way it made a sexual relationship between men emotionally credible to a straight audience.   Director Ang Lee rightly won the Oscar for that. But I don't think Brokeback Mountain is a great film. It's far too long, soggy, and monotonous, and its bleak portrait of small-town and working-class life is (in my indignant view) condescending and offensively elitist. Without the picture-postcard mountain photography and wonderfully evocative score (which won an Oscar), this would be a small movie on the early '90s indy level.

I was steadily annoyed by the over-stylish, absurdly clean and unwrinkled clothes of the two leads (they looked like Ralph Lauren catalog models) and by the sexist stereotyping of their betrayed and increasingly unattractive wives. Heath Ledger deserved his Oscar nomination, but (contrary to Annie Proulx's assertion) it wasn't really a major Oscar-winning performance. Ledger impressed me at first with his muted, strangled delivery, but he showed little development over time in his character and relied too often on a series of phlegmatic, shop-worn mannerisms borrowed from James Dean and Montgomery Clift.

As for Jake Gyllenhaal, I found him initially intriguing, but all that smirky eyelash-batting began grating on me. By the second half, he had morphed (with the mustache and sideburns) into a Las Vegas-period Wayne Newton impersonator--hardly a macho role model. I found the sudden removal of Gyllenhaal's character from the script via a brutal gay-bashing simplistic and egregious--although no more so than the earlier bizarre mutilation-murder of an old gay man in a gully, which Ledger's character was improbably forced to narrate.

The intrusion of a political agenda so baldly at those points struck me as factitious and reductive, betraying too-heavy manipulation by the screenwriters. (The director, in contrast, tried to soften that material by treating it as mere cinematic flashes.) Why hammer the audience?--unless you have no confidence in your central theme. Those coercive details artistically diminished the film and, I suspect, harmed its Oscar chances.

A great film by definition is one that invites and demands repeated re-viewings. For example, I've seen such films as The Philadelphia Story, Gone with the Wind, All About Eve , The Ten Commandments , Vertigo, North by Northwest, Auntie Mame, Ben-Hur , Suddenly Last Summer, Lawrence of Arabia , and Valley of the Dolls countless times and look forward to many more. For me, they are permanent life experiences.

I'm sure many gay men will take intense and even ecstatic pleasure in revisiting Brokeback Mountain 's fantasy cowboy romance. But I have no interest in seeing that dreary film again. I had quite enough exposure to the buggy, dank discomforts of camping when I was a teenaged Girl Scout, thank you very much. Arthur Hiller's intelligent 1982 film, Making Love, starring Harry Hamlin and Michael Ontkean, remains my favorite film to date about gay men.

Related Reading

Interview with Camille Paglia
Feature: My Own Private New Queer Cinema
The Laramie Project
Capote
Brokeback Mountain