8 1/2 (1963)

Directed by: Federico Fellini
Written by: Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli, Brunello Rondi
Starring: Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale, Anouk Aimee, Eddra Gale, Barbara Steele 
Rated: NR

When we think of the "greats" of the cinema there are a few who naturally spring to mind: Kubrick, Copolla, Bergman, Ozu, Kurasawa. Renoir, Orwell, Ford. I don't know if any, however, meet the shear might and inventiveness of Federico Fellini who for all his flaws and all his indulgences captures the vitality, the sexual drive, the passion and the flair of the cinema better than all the others. I wonder though, with all of these men who broke the bone and sucked the marrow of film, did any of them doubt themselves and hate their work in the way Fellini did? Did they have that suffocating lack of faith in their artistic worth? Could they create a masterpiece and never see the forest for the trees? If they did, none of them were brave enough to speak their fears aloud in the way Fellini did in his monumental "8 1/2". If there has ever been a better film made about the creative process then I haven't seen it.

It is at this point that Fellini began to dip into his surrealist, emotive phase, choosing to discard his episodic yet contiguous pieces in favor of work which flowed more organically and relied on feeling and instinct as opposed to traditional structure. This is nowhere near as bizarre as his later work, but from an opening sequence in which our protagonist, Guido (Marcello Mastroianni), is found trapped in a car in a traffic jam, only to end up floating above the clouds, a rope tied to his ankle like a kite, there is a definite sense of claustrophobia and restlessness, moods which will come to dominate the rest of the piece

Guido is a filmmaker at the peak of his career, and Guido is in a creative slump. With studio executives and all of the women in his life harping on him to make another film, and with a repugnant, uber expensive space shuttle being constructed for a film which he has yet to even pen, Guido finds himself under stifling pressure for which he is not able to cope with.

One by one, woman and woman and woman is introduced to us, a continuation of themes brought up in previous Fellini movies. The man is both obsessed and dreadfully afraid of the fairer sex, and here Fellini in the form of Guido is pushed and pulled to follow his ambitions--to have sex, to relax, to explore, to work until he dies. The hapless man knows only that the well is dry. There are people who are naturally creative; they aren't tethered by the awful plague called Shame, but occasionally the constant rays of an ever-attentive audience burns up the spring, something which needs the precious raindrops of time to replenish.

Guido's rain should supposedly come from a retreat to the healing waters of some mountain resort, but the unforgiving nature of his business does not allow the mineral springs to take their effect. A roadblock is a roadblock and Fellini's message is that continually driving more cars into the blockade will not clear the wreckage and let the ambulance through. It is as much a sorrowful look at old-age and the dread of worthlessness as it is a manifestation of feelings of incompetency.

Fellini did what nearly all other directors would have been terrified to do: he took his insecurities and he found a way to capture them in scenes. In dreams and fantasies and memories he personified his doubts into the beautiful abstractness of women which have so long puzzled and fascinated him, and in this way he was able to cope with his own sense of inadequacy and present for the masses the black dog of writer's block (or whatever the term may be for a director--I assume it isn't much different).

Tracing Guido/Fellini's life we travel from childhood through marriage and possibly divorce and we observe the women who guided and molded Guido in the macho snob who is his own greatest failure. We cannot hate him, of course. He acts out and pushes others away because he is afraid. The internal conflict in Mastroianni's eyes is understated yet very moving.

Fellini takes emotions and brings them into tangible forms. In a way they seem almost like scenes of my own life. That is Fellini's rare gift, I think, to turn the abstract and the fantastic into something relatable. We might not truly understand the implications of a scene and may surely bring it out of context, but somehow his work--in whatever small form--relates to us and seems to find its way into fitting into the rest of the story. It is his universality that makes Fellini a great and his arguments something worth listening to. I know that as a hopeful writer I find comfort in his feelings of inaptness. I look at the perfection of so many of his movies and it makes me think that perhaps nothing deserves to be made if its maker didn't at some point believe that it was worth nothing. For only then do you know that he found the inspiration and the drive to correct his mistakes and construct something truly wonderful for his audience.

4/4

This Is the End (2013)

Directed by: Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg
Written by: Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg
Starring: James Franco, Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel, Jonah Hill, Danny McBride, Craig Robinson
Rated: R

Upon exiting the theater having just seen "This Is the End", my buddy and I immediately began talking about the movie and why it got such positive reviews. He postulated that all critics hate comedies and therefore the film must be great. I'm not sure I quite agree with that. After all, I like to laugh and so does everyone I've ever met. A good comedy and a bottle of your drink of choice is the best remedy for a bad day. But there's the qualifier. A "good" comedy, hell a good film in general is damn hard to find, and bad comedies are the easiest to tear apart for the big, fat reason that they target demographics that would do better spending $10 buying a dictionary. But if I may speak for all critics, I'd like to say that I avoid comedies if I can help it because with a drama, even if it's lousy, more often than not I can still give it points for having tried to say something new. With a comedy, and particularly one that features any of the cast in this film, I usually just tell myself that I've heard all the poop jokes I want to hear, and I give it a miss.

There are definitely the raunchy, easy jokes that I expected to find in this movie, no doubt about it. I mean, you can't really assemble Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel, James Franco, Jonah Hill, Danny McBride, Craig Robinson, Michael Cera and Paul Rudd and not have a few jokes--or many, many--about sex and drugs and all of the other things that bros talk about. That said, thinking back on it I can't remember any toilet humor at all. Maybe that's why there aren't any profanities in my notes.

But for all of the easy jokes that stuff this movie, I found myself really enjoying Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen's blend of buddy movie and apocalyptic horror. It's a self-parody on multiple levels, all of the actors playing themselves, and most of them doing wickedly funny impersonations of what we've come to expect them to be. I don't know how true any of the relationships in the story are in real life, but here Seth and Jay are two best friends reunited in LA after many months apart. Much to Jay's annoyance, Seth has made a circle of new friends including James, Jonah and Craig, but trying to appease Seth he agrees to attend a party at James Franco's house.

The first third of the script is laugh-out-loud funny, and my friend and I both agreed that a hilarious film could have resulted had they cut the last two-thirds of the story and simply had a movie about stars beings stars off screen. Each moment was packed full of inside jokes and referential quips with each of the actors poking fun at their careers and their images. The cameos are almost too many to name, but some big ones were Paul Rudd, Rihanna, Aziz Ansari and Mindy Kaling. Michael Cera had a small but hysterical part as a coked-out sex fiend. Also, I'm not sure if this was on purpose or not, but Emma Watson also had a brief role in which she had a terrible British accent. I honestly don't know if it was affected or not, but it would be awesome if it were.

James Franco plays the playboy douche whose evening and house is destroyed when the rapture hits Hollywood. Earthquakes, fire and demons engulf the city, and after a great many deaths only Seth, Jay, James, Jonah, Danny and Craig are left in James' obscenely huge house while things outside literally go to Hell. Over the following hour (at least 15 minutes too long) we watch the six of them try to stay alive as fire and brimstone rains down around them, but we also watch as their friendships are tested. Never fear though, nothing starring Seth Rogen could possibly end up poorly. Can you imagine if he was damned to burn for eternity?

This will probably be looked back on as the best feel-good comedy of the summer and a sleeper hit at that. It has enough smart things going on all the time, as well as a constant energy, that one can probably overlook the fact that there is very little in the way of actual plot and that everything is resolved a bit too neatly. The greasy Franco and the effeminate Hill were good enough that I was happy I saw it in any case, and dozens of quotably funny lines smoothed out the wrinkles I saw when they weren't on screen.

I laughed a lot and I left happy, so I guess their job was done well. It wasn't as smart as it could have been, but the twist on an otherwise formulaic story was strong enough to grab my attention and keep it fixed on the screen long after it should have been.

3/4

Playtime (1967)

Directed by: Jacques Tati
Written by: Jacques Tati, Jacques Lagrange, Art Buchwald
Starring: Jacques Tati
Rated: NR

Jacques Tati is little known outside of Europe, but he is without a doubt one of my favorite of all directors and a curious beast to write about. There simply isn't anyone else quite like him and therefore not much to juxtapose him to. Having only made four films there isn't much even of his own in which to compare individual films. Even still, his boundless imagination and the painstaking efforts he took to execute some of the most elaborate and clever scenes I have ever watched make him something special, and "Playtime" is the crown jewel out of his very small collection of gems.

"Les vacances de Monsieur Hulot", "Mon oncle", "Trafic" and "Playtime" all star Tati as the bumbling M. Hulot, a blissfully hazardous old man in his iconic overcoat-tweed-hat-umbrella ensemble, who inadvertently reeks micro-havoc wherever he goes. In the last and greatest of the four films, M. Hulot finds himself in the swirling new world of modernized, industrialized Paris, the city playing host to a gaggle of chatty American tourists. The first half of the movie follows him as wanders a labyrinthine convention where the latest and greatest new gizmos are on display. The second half shows the opening night from hell, where an ultra-chic new restaurant tries to maintain a cool face as the building is falling apart right below its feet.

Tati practically ruined himself with this monstrous commercial flop, having spent obscene monies constructing skyscrapers to fulfill his vision of the technological absurdity of modern Paris. I mean, the man practically made his own city for this film and nobody went to see it. God did they miss out. For months he toiled choreographing jaw-dropping and hilarious sight and sound gags, the likes of which rival or even trump those of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.

Consider an opening scene: M. Hulot is scheduled to meet an American official for some undisclosed purpose. He steps into a vast glass building full of cubicles, and with perfect precision, coordinating dozens and dozens of extras on a complex set, the two continuously miss each other for minutes on end. They open doors when they need to be opened, arrive in booths just in time to answer phone calls, and all the while there are no takes and the director is in the midst of it all playing his character. It's staggering.

Others are more subtle yet equally amusing. A long setup to a very small joke involves two couples living in adjoining apartments. The camera sits on the street looking into the rooms through wall-sized windows with only a small wall separating the two. Two families sit down to watch television, seemingly looking at one another. When the families go to sleep the father on the left apartment begins to undress which the woman in the right apartment continues to watch TV. Because of the camera angle it appears as though she is watching him striptease for her.



When I first saw this movie I was thoroughly confused as I had had no previous introduction to Tati's work. It was only about forty minutes in that I fully began to understand the nature of the piece and by that time I had missed so many crucial jokes. If you do watch this movie--and I absolutely, 100% recommend that you do--watch his other three films first. As a collective they tell a story, you understand his humor better, and a personal arc in depth and storytelling emerges, even if it isn't immediately apparent.

At first "Playtime" seems like a comedy, and I suppose that in most ways it is. But there is also a great sadness to it. M. Hulot is like an old friend to me. He appears on screen and can't help but smile. I have realized over multiple viewings of all of his work that Tati needed an affable character to front his films because they are quiet cries of alarm over a changing landscape of France. Hulot is the whimsy and the romance of Paris that is all too quickly being swallowed up by an unforgiving modernization taking root. The statement may be a bit overblown but that really doesn't diminish the point he is making.

When you watch Tati's work you will immediately discover that he manipulates sight and sound to draw focus through a dizzying barrage of action on one particular object or conversation. It may not be funny, it may not be relevant, and that's the point. It is only when Hulot encounters technology or a sudden change that he creates mayhem. When he is allowed to stroll the streets and puff his pipe he blends seamlessly with the world around him.

There is an exuberance in his work that comes from a man who really loves the little things in life. A finely-dressed gentleman walks down the street with luggage that contains his flight tag. As he walks and talks importantly the tag flutters in the breeze and suddenly all we can hear is the sound it makes. The man becomes unimportant and all that's left is a little inanimate object that played an valuable yet thankless role in someone's life for a brief moment.

The overarching theme to it all is that we spend so much time fretting about, advancing and speeding up and making things efficient, that we forget to take that moment to breathe and appreciate that we are alive. There is goodness in the world that we would be able to see if only we stopped caring about petty nonsense. After all, what's the good of making things more convenient for us if we don't stop to enjoy the extra second we have saved for ourselves? Every time I watch a piece by Tati I feel a wave of restfulness wash over me, for it is gratifying to have an affirmation that life is good and really truly worth living every once in a while.

Although I do sense a very deep undercurrent of despair in this film it does have a happy ending. At the end of it all, the world keeps turning. And maybe all that chrome and steel, glitz and glamour is just a facade. When you think about it, the swankiest restaurant of new Paris turns out to be nothing more than cheap glue, bad wiring and all of the faults that come from doing a bad job too quickly. The people who attend, however, have a wonderful evening, and when the sun comes up what's "really Paris" emerges and all is right in life.

4/4

The Lady Vanishes (1938)

Directed by: Alfred Hitchcock

Written by: Sidney Galliat 

Starring: Margaret Lockwood, Michael Redgrave, Paul Lukas, Dame May Whitty

Rated: Approved

Alfred Hitchcock seems to be far more savvy than even he lets on, creating a perfectly mediocre film, but one that latched onto the Second World War fascination even before that war could be capitalized. The script seems now to be a rather obvious ripoff of Agatha Christie's "Murder on the Orient Express", just without the dynamic characters or the clever explanation at the end. What is far more peculiar is why Hitchcock liked the story and his film so much that he decided to use it second time in his 1950's television show. 

Set on a train outbound from a remote skiing village in Italy, a young playgirl named Iris (Margaret Lockwood) finds herself in mystery story involving the elderly Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty) who seems to have vanished into thin air (as Hitchcock would muse, what is it about thin air that makes it so easy to disappear into?). Suffering a convenient head injury, Iris is escorted into a train car by Miss Froy, shares tea with her, and goes to sleep. When Iris awakens, however, Miss Froy is nowhere to be found, and what's more nobody on the train seems to have any recollection of the woman being on board at all. 

It's a rather conventional story of who knows what and why is everyone keeping mum. Iris teams up with a Cary Grant-esque hero named Gilbert (Michael Redgrave), the two of them facing a host of misadventures involving a series of stereotyped yet amusing supporting characters. Although the film turns out to be a rather serious story it is steeped in comedy, most of the humor involving Hitchcock's jabs at nationalism.

Indeed, what I found most enjoyable about the who thing was not Miss Froy or Iris's battle with the rest of the train who believes she's crazy. After all, the two of them aren't particularly well-constructed characters to begin with, nor were they played memorably. No, the best part of it all was Hitchcock's Orwellian playfulness with the idea of what it means to be English (certainly not British; no one need ever include the bloody Welsh). The two funniest characters are a couple of good ol' boys named Caldicott and Charters, men who obviously know something is amiss on the train, but only care that they aren't delayed lest they miss their cricket match back home. Hitchcock, like Orwell, loved the English and relished in his Englishness right down to the stiff upper lip and unerring manners. A queue must be respected and you never pour the tea unless the water has been properly boiled. 

The gravitas eventually takes over much of the humor and by the end we are fully submersed in the in the type of episode that would be beaten to death by British filmmakers over the next umpteen years. It ends far too abruptly and with the type of sappy ending that positively reeks of cheese. What's unfortunate is that the movie has an unjustifiably long prelude in an Italian hotel which goes nowhere and offers little to no information pertaining to the subsequent story. If their budget allotted only so much screentime it would have made for a far better movie had they shorted the intro and shaped a more challenging ending. One can't help but feel gyped out by how neatly all the loose ends were cleaned up. 

Perhaps there simply wasn't enough to fill in the story though. A train isn't a terribly big location and at its core the plot was rather simplistic. I'm not certain that that there was enough for someone to make a 90 minute movie, and if that was the case then shame on Mr. Hitchcock. Had he only been a bit more patient he could have gotten the rights to Agatha Christie's book and could have added that success to his list, as opposed to losing it to Sidney Lumet. 

1.5/4 

Pulp Fiction (1994)

Directed by: Quentin Tarantino
Written by: Quentin Tarantino 
Starring: John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman, Bruce Willis, Tim Roth, Amanda Plummer
Rated: R

There are a precious few movies floating out in the great big world of cinema in which an audience member can watch it and see that a shift in the entire medium has occurred. "Citizen Kane" is one of those movies, "A Streetcar Named Desire" is another. I think one can safely say that Quentin Tarantino's genre-defying "Pulp Fiction" can be added to that very short list. Once a humble video store clerk and now a household name, Tarantino defined what it meant to be a film in the 90's and reestablished the promising power of film as a genre with his groundbreaking, episodic crime thriller.

My father knows somebody who knows somebody who knew the now famed writer-director before he became the idol of every early-twenties man who has ever sat around at home in front of his TV with a bong and a pack of microwave burritos. Watching any piece by Tarantino, it is all too obvious that the man had a fondness for movies, but who would ever have thought that the zealous nerd would ever make good on his word of rocketing John Travolta back into stardom? I mean... John Travolta? Really? But hey, a man with a vision is hard to stop.

Intelligently talking about "Pulp Fiction" is probably very similar to what Tarantino felt when writing it. The first truly notably film of its kind, the piece is broken up into four small vignettes, obviously a descendant of Fellini. Unlike the Italian master, however, this film has its stories clearly divided between different characters and loosely tied together by one coherent message. Each of them are perfect in their own right, but viewed as one whole the entire story is a dizzying display of cinematic passion.

So let's begin at the beginning.

Story one: Vincent Vega, a Europhile hitman takes a crime lord's wife, Mia Wallis, on a platonic date to a cheesy, 50's diner. After a terrific evening spent with Buddy Holly, Marilyn Monroe and the rest of the gang, Mia inadvertently overdoses on heroine and Vincent must thrust a shot of adrenaline into her heart.

Story two: An aging boxer who has agreed to throw a match pulls a fast one on the gangsters who fixed the fight, but while attempting to flee Los Angeles he realizes his girlfriend has misplaced his late father's gold watch and must retrieve it. Along the way he finds himself a fly caught in BDSM spider's web.

Story three: Another Vega story, this time with his partner Jules Winnfield, who accidentally blow a man's brains out in the back of their car. In order to avoid the attention of the cops they stop at the house of a "friend" and must acquire the help of the Wolf to solve their predicament.

Story four: Honey Bunny and Pumpkin, a couple of two-bit robbers from who knows where attempt to hold up a restaurant, only to be thwarted by our two hit men. Jules lays down some heavy, Old Testament shit and the villains learn the error of their ways.

The film just defines "cool". Tarantino would earn an Oscar and set the bar impossibly high for himself with his razor-sharp, offbeat ear for dialogue. To this day, nearly twenty years after he penned his magnum opus, I don't believe that there is another person who writes the way that he does as well as he does, though many unfortunate souls have tried and failed. His success, I believe, lies in the way that he defines each character by the way they speak. There is no attempt at realism here, but rather an almost comic book definition of reality...or pulp definition, I suppose. Honey Bunny and Pumpkin have a fast, 1930's slapstick style approach to their speech (I believe Tarantino noted "His Girl Friday" as the inspiration). Vega has the rolling, lethargic witticisms of a stoner philosopher. Jules is Rapture meets hood. And Mia, my favorite, is the crystal clarity of all things you wish you couldn't say, put oh so eloquently. It is Tarantino's complete disregard of the fundamentals of movie-making that makes this so uniquely, supremely successful.

For all of the tenaciousness of the director, with his satisfying blend of camp, blood, twisted humor and reverence to the true greats of the cinema, it was his eye for actors that really makes this film a solid, watchable, re-watchable, re-re-watchable classic. Uma Thurman, Samuel L. Jackson and, yes, John Travolta head a fabulous cast of actors playing defined, hilarious, distinctive characters as expertly as one could ever hope. A film like this would have failed immediately and Tarantino would have been erased from our memories where they not truly great performances.

What a job to impart pure vision to a whole host of actors, some of which had never been a film of repute. I praise Tarantino not for his script (though it is disgustingly good) but for his connection to his actors, relaying what it was that he wanted to say, freeing his actors to explore and fight against convention and to simply have fun--speaking great words, but doing so in such a way that it didn't isolate the audience from the film. It is both watchable and very smart.

Watch the other big films of the 90's and early 2000's and I challenge you to defy the statement that "Pulp Fiction" dictated the way that movies would be made for years to come. "Crash", "Magnolia", "Amores Perros"--so many are all defined by the precedent that Tarantino set forth. He has not yet come close to trumping his greatest work, and I doubt he ever will, but that doesn't matter. He might have piqued early, but he has written himself into this blog in the same paragraph as Fellini, and I cringe to think of the director who would scoff at that.

4/4

The Grapes of Wrath (1940)

Directed by: John Ford

Written by: Nunnally Johnson

Starring: Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell, John Carradine, John Qualen 

Rated: PG

Of the great American films "The Grapes of Wrath" is possibly the most quintessential. Based on the landmark novel penned by John Steinbeck, starring the gifted Nebraskan, Henry Fonda, and directed by the most American of American directors, John Ford, this film not only presents what it means to be from and of the United States, but in the film's very being it encompasses those qualities. 

In the world of history, of which I reside in only slightly, the Dust Bowl is often taught in a clumsy and dismissive way. Normally it is presented as nothing more than sideshow act, an amusing note to give when discussing the causes and results of the great, big Depression. There is a wonderful book called The Worst Hard Time, by Timothy Egan, who explains with vivacity the deep causes of the Dust Bowl. It went back very far--much farther than most people know--and its repercussions were devastating. But of course, nature can't outdraw economics and so the tale is rarely told. 

We know now in greater detail the roots of the Great Depression (though we have learned very little from it), but Steinbeck's story is so moving because it was written just years after the events, the film made not long after, and the characters are as ignorant as contemporary politicians. It tells the harrowing tale of Tom Joad, a paroled killer who returns to his family's farm only to learn that it is being repossessed by the bank. The sharecropping families of generations passed have ended and people are being forced out. By whom? They don't know. It's all one ugly web of "Who's to Blame?" The twelve Joad's pile into the family jalopy and head west toward California and the American Dream, only to learn that that dream is as tangible as the economy.    

Probably better than any other movie, this speaks to the transformative power of the road. Old folks die, babies are born, a family threatens to split at the seam, and the only two people holding it together are Tom (Fonda) and Ma (Jane Darwell). But that adhesive is weak, especially when the food pot is low and funds are running dry. Finally completing the journey from Oklahoma to California, the family is met with nothing more than hateful stares, unfriendly cops and no jobs to be found. One problem leads to another and it seems as though the Joad's might be done for. 

They are, really. After all, though the takeaway message may be that home is where the heart is, in the end that little family on their truck is as about as useless as the land they ruined. Given the overt Socialist messages of the script I would have to say that that was never Steinbeck's intention, and perhaps that's my own lack of heart not allowing me to see the forest for the trees, but in the end there were just too many mouths to feed, and too many greedy spiders in that web to make them of any great consequence. Tom is the everyman and we only remember his name because Steinbeck decided to write it. 

Told with soul and the right balance of humor and pathos, Ford has made a film that will last and be studied. It is the perfect example of a movie that can be read as historical text, for it shows how a public artist interpreted the events surrounding him. Ma and Tom are the hearts of the American public, the downtrodden that is spoken of on the Statue of Liberty, and they go unheeded. They are left in the dust. 

It makes me wonder about the final scene, though. I read the novel maybe eight or ten years ago--I was far too young--and of all the scenes that I recall, the final one remains freshest. Ahead lies a spoiler for the book, though not necessarily for the film: This very controversial scene involves Tom's sister, the pregnant Rose of Sharon, who breastfeeds a starving man with a mysterious smile on her face. Throughout the book and the film an argument is made that this untouchable government has transformed good, honest men into animals, and this scene completes that picture. Rose must then represent the triumph of a common person who with grace and dignity helps those who need her most. 

Ford omits this scene, instead ending the film with Tom leaving the family and Ma delivering a stirring monologue about the enduring American spirit. The image may have been too startling for Ford's audience and that is perfectly reasonable, but then where is the heart? One of the cornerstones of the family abandons them and the family is still left without work, and now with one less pair of working hands. They have sacrificed all and gained nothing, and Tom decides to spare them his presence. That doesn't make much sense to me. 

I could go on, but what's the point? This is a blog intended to critique, not to analyze. The film is undoubtedly great, and all the more important because it is worth being analyzed. I suppose much of the credit is owed to Steinbeck, but Ford deserves no small amount of praise by offering a tough book with strong political messages to a wider audience, and doing so with that special talent that he possessed.

4/4

Brokeback Mountain (2005)

Directed by: Ang Lee
Written By: Larry McMurty and Diana Ossana
Starring: Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams, Anne Hathaway
Rated: R

I have a weakness for superlatives, I know. I'm the type of person who feels all of an emotion or nothing at all; if I enjoy something then I love it, and if I don't I hate it. I like using grand words that many films and performances probably don't rightly deserve simply because I appreciate that they were able to elicit an emotional response from me. But believe when I say that am not going to exaggerate with this film. In fifty years, when we look back on all of the movies that have passed the test of time, "Brokeback Mountain" will be remembered as one of the defining cinematic moments of the first decade of our century.

Of course the film faces stigma brought on by the three ugliest words that could be strung together to describe it: gay cowboy movie. Sure, a person can thickly go into this film and sludge three tangible words together that describe it on less than its most basic level. All three of them would be true in some sense or another, and many people read those words or hear them spoken and they tune out and shut down. Ernest Borgnine went on record stating that he would neither watch nor vote for the film, as it was a disgrace to Western genre. That is the price Ang Lee paid for venturing into territory that filmmmakers before him only danced around. For those of you who do give it a chance I hope you sponge away those three blemishing words and accept a love story for what it is.

Set in the sweeping, picturesque mountains of rural Wyoming, Lee's tale of unrequited love is placed against a changing Western backdrop. Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Ennis (Heath Ledger), two teenage ranch hands, are hired to tend sheep up on old Brokeback. Quiet and secluded, the first third of the story watches them drink, shoot coyotes, and generally be cowboys. One miserably cold night forces them to share a tent, and in the darkness Jack instigates one of the most singularly unusual sex scenes ever filmed.

I remember seeing this movie in a full theater when I was 15 and newly out as a gay man, and the scene frightened me. Ennis is a man of very few words, a brooding man's man. When he and Jack are intimate for the first time it is angry and violent, almost a fight in which Ennis asserts that it is simply physical, jumping onto Jack, heaving with his clothes still on. The next day, after a long pause, Ennis tells Jack "You know I ain't queer?", to which Jack immediately jumps in, "Me neither." They are--or at least Jack is--but 1963 Wyoming gives them no outlet and no words to express themselves in any other way.

The second time they are together it is not sex, it is love making. The scene is passionate, with Jack cradling Ennis like a child. Their brief summer of exploration comes to an end, but it forms a lifetime of longing and loneliness as the two of them try and keep the small sparks of their intense love alive, through failed marriages, children, thankless jobs and thousands of miles distance between them. Jack wants the two of them to start a ranch together, to be with each other all the time, but Ennis is too aware of his surroundings. A frightening flashback shows a young Ennis being taken to an old ravine with his father where a dead man with his penis pulled off lies rotting. That was his price for living alone with another man, and Ennis fears the same.

The Taiwanese Ang Lee has proven himself to be one of the most thoughtful and versatile working directors, offering us an expansive, delicate and emotionally thunderous movie about two men whose lives are ruined for having loved. He is as introspective as focused and compassionate with his characters as someone like Bergman; he is a brutal and honest humanist.

Rolling slowly through decades we watch Jack sell large farming equipment, in a marriage with a woman (Anne Hathaway) that is little more than a business partnership. Surely she suspects him. Jack has been to Mexico picking up prostitutes and he often flirts with rodeo boys. His few yearly encounters with Ennis disguised as fishing trips are not enough to satisfy his desire to be close to a man.

For Ennis, I don't believe he was ever gay, but more just impossibly in love. His life goes nowhere and he is nothing. His marriage to Alma (Michelle Williams) ends when she discovers her husband's affair, and Ennis takes no steps to better himself, his life slowing pulling him ahead even though he is anchored to his memory of that first summer with Jack.

This film would be nothing were the main characters not acted with love. A first-rate ensemble cast is spearheaded by stunningly powerful performances by Ledger, Gyllenhaal and Williams. Ledger in particular is almost too good and too sad to watch. The man lives and breathes Ennis Del Mar, who is so scared of who is and what he wants that he leads his life to ruin. He nearly shatters from the inside out, but keeps it in grasp behind a low growl and a stern face. It is truly a magnificent performance.

I won't spoil the ending, but it is ambiguous and devastating at the same time. For what Borgnine said about the film, let me offer an opposing opinion. Daniel Day-Lewis, our modern Brando, has said that this is one of his favorite films, and that its final scene was "as moving as anything I have ever seen." Now, you can read a review of some uppity, superlative-happy critic who proclaims this as an immensely important cinematic masterpiece, or you can take a quote that like from one of the great screen actors and do with it what you will. I think that this film may still yet be ahead of its time, or perhaps those who watch it and call it a gay cowboy movie don't know how love should be represented on screen. In any case it was made, it was made perfectly and I know that it will be remembered as one of the greats.

4/4