Canadian article about BBM dvd release.
Jennis.x
The Abbotsford News
Mountain is loaded with talent
By RICK DENNIS
Apr 29 2006
Maybe it’s spending large periods of your life alone under that limitless expanse of Western sky.
Confronted with that existential vastness it is hard to know what to say.
“By and large cowboys are laconic. They’re not real comfortable in social situations,” director Ang Lee informs us on the Brokeback Mountain DVD (Rated 14A 134 mins.).
Just making small talk can be an effort. Imagine what happens when Wyoming ranch hand Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Texas rodeo cowboy Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) find themselves in the grip of an inexplicable yet overwhelming attraction and struggle to put it into words while herding sheep on Brokeback Mountain in the summer of 1963.
Whatever it is grabs hold of their hearts and won’t let go even after Ennis marries boyhood sweetheart Alma Beers (Michelle Williams) and Jack gets hitched to rodeo cowgirl Lurene Newsome (Anne Hathaway).
You get the sense Jack is familiar with these kinds of feelings even if he doesn’t understand them. For Ennis, though, this is “a one-shot thing we got goin’ on here,” as baffling to figure out as a sudden snowfall in spring and just as impossible to do anything about (“If you can’t fix it, you gotta stand it.”)
Larry McMurtry knows about the drama that can lie beneath the surface of small town life in the modern American West (he wrote 1972’s The Last Picture Show). Together with writing partner Diana Ossana he fleshes out Annie Proulx’s 30 page short story in The New Yorker into a feature length screenplay with novelistic depth and detail.
“Larry warned me about the non verbal culture in America,” Lee smiles. “He says in some ways its harder to do than a verbal culture.”
The challenge for the actors is to communicate the conflict of emotions and feelings raging in their heads with a minimum of dialogue. Hathaway nails Ledger’s take on the character: “Ennis is somebody that keeps his feelings so trapped and pushed down that it’s almost like when he talks the words are punching themselves out of his mouth.”
Speaking about being at a loss for words, the look on Alma’s face as she accidentally comes upon her husband locked in a heated embrace with his “fishing buddy” Jack says everything we need to know about her sudden discovery of Ennis’ secret life.
The acting “choices” Williams makes in this one scene alone show why the former Dawson’s Creek hottie catapulted into Oscar contention with this role.
“It’s been dubbed ‘the gay cowboy movie’,” Williams says. “When you find a cliche, you’ll always find something more complex at the bottom of it.”
As a middle-aged heterosexual male I admit I approached the subject matter with some trepidation but by the end of the film the emotions invoked make a compelling case for the argument that true love can transcend gender and societal norms and arouse feelings of pain and longing as intense as any union of soul and body.
Link to original source:
http://www.abbynews.com/portals-code/list.cgi?paper=38&cat=44&id=638891&more=
