BuzzFlash Reviews

BUZZFLASH REVIEWS

Released in DVD on April 4, "Brokeback Mountain" is a rare film that combines first rate cinematography, directing, acting, scripting and music. The rugged natural setting is as much a star as the two lead cowboys are -- and the simple musical refrain adds to the slow-paced gritty romanticism that resonates throughout the move.

The Director, Ang Lee, knows how to take a bygone era and turn it into a series of photographic frames that reveal so much about an age and place.

Oh yes, and how could we forget, it's the story about forbidden love. In this case, the great debate last year was between those who wanted to argue it had to be recognized as a gay film for advocacy purposes and those who argued that it was a film about the universal theme of lost love.

Suffice it to say, the universality of the film defied right wing critics, who practically gave up attacking it, because it was just too popular. The film casts a languorous spell that makes one think of love, longings of the soul and long-term relationships that could not be.

There isn't anything the least bit preachy or didactic about "Brokeback Mountain," in the same way that that there is no political lesson in "Romeo and Juliet." Ang Lee reveals this movie in the same sparing prose used by the story's original author, Annie Proulx. Heck, cowboys aren't the garrulous types, after all.

And maybe that's why Americans across the country flocked to see "Brokeback Mountain." It really is a cowboy movie.

They just happened to be gay cowboys at a time when you couldn't admit it, and that made all the difference in the course of their lives.

It's a movie that stuns you first with the beauty of the landscape, second with the revelation of passion, and third with the entrance of a stream of new characters to widen the scope of the film into a much more complicated game of ill-fated relationships.

This is a movie where the acting could have been easily overplayed, but the cast sets the right, realistic tone -- and when sentimentality creeps in, it seems entirely appropriate to the moment.

Ang Lee maintains a consistently high standard, a brilliant blending of the cinematic art into a compelling story that like any great art transcends an advocacy message.

BUZZFLASH REVIEWS