I don't know if I like the idea of a straight, Chinese director becoming "type-cast" as a director of gay-themed movies!

Care to explain that rather loaded statement? Should his personal demographic typecast him strictly as a director of stories about straight, middle-aged, happily married Chinese guys?

Brokeback Mountain is serious. Credits rolling in silence serious. Terse dialogue and few laughs serious. We’re all going to watch this in a dour and grown-up state of mind serious. It’s a message movie, lumbering and monotonous in just the way to appeal to the heartland of America. There’s no missing the point, because everything else, anything human or spontaneous or digressive, is eliminated. I was bored out of my skull.

Trish's confusion about the first sex scene is understandable. It’s terribly prepared for. True, the script has lines that can be taken for these two men testing the waters, feeling each other out. And obviously we go into the movie knowing what it’s about. But it would help if the director or the actors shaped the scenes to illustrate the men’s attraction to each other. And Ledger and Gyllenhaal have demonstrated no chemistry. The scene itself is awkwardly staged and shot. There’s no way for us to get into it, and almost everything seems to be set up so we don’t (not only does Ledger as the top not use lube, but Gyllenhaal bottoming has been eating beans for weeks). If it were a hot, sexually charged scene, that would take away from the somber, serious drama.

The problem is, sex, if done right, is usually a pleasurable experience, and a movie about sex that doesn’t have the courage to be erotic is running from its subject. These men don’t have much, but they have the moments when their bodies connect. Shouldn’t the pleasure, the liberation, of that be demonstrated? Why must the whole movie be so stoic and funereal?

Because if it weren’t, we’d lose the message: there is hate in the world, and same-sex couples are not free to love. Any indication of happiness, even momentary, would theoretically hamper that (I don't agree, I think it would sharpen the pain, but this is the mindset I think the picture is operating from). Ennis and Jack must always be unsatisfied, always unhappy, always shadowed by people who hate. This is a highly didactic picture.

The whole movie feels false, from the pretty-boy stars to the postcard scenery to the awkward attempts at showing the men shirtless or naked without being exploitative (I guess we can call this “tasteful” or “restrained”). The movie seems dislodged from any real time or place, despite the hairdos and brick-a-brack to indicate what decade we’re in. Anemic country music plays at social gatherings and bars (we finally get some Willie Nelson, but only as the final credits role). The sets feel hollow and unreal. When the two go into Randy Quaid’s trailer office for a job, the place is filled with clutter. But it’s artfully arranged clutter, frozen in place. We see more of the same in the homes of Ledger and Gyllenhaal. No one ever interacts with the junk that surrounds them. It’s just there for aesthetics. The Last Picture Show as produced by Merchant-Ivory.

Ledger gives a terrible one-note performance, but Gyllenhaal is a bit better. His scene looking for another job on Brokeback is particularly good, and he does here what Ledger is basically incapable of: effectively conveying to the audience the thoughts he’s afraid to articulate. Maybe he’s just lucky to have the more innocent and playful role. His wide-eyed look of hurt is effective, and his lassoing of Ledger or telling off his father-in-law provide rare times the audience can sit back and relax. He’s not remotely believable as a country boy, but neither of them are. And the only time their love for each other felt authentic to me was at their first reunion, when Ledger can’t control his desire. But of course there has to be the quick cut to Ledger’s wife: can’t let go of that message.

The ending is undeniably powerful, I left the theater shook up. It’s powerful in the same way scenes dealing with the Holocaust are powerful, or scenes of spousal or child abuse. But this is the easiest, most knee-jerk way a movie can get to an audience. Is this courageous? And should we congratulate a movie for demonstrating what anyone with a moral sense already knows? I get the message, I agree with the point, but I don’t need an after school special on hate crimes. I need a movie that has some life in it, that gives insight into human nature. With luck, it will do this so effectively that it becomes a work of art. Brokeback Mountain smothers the life out of its subject, and if it's art, it's of too determinably monotonous and Victorian a nature to work for me.

Brokeback Mountain is extraordinary because it is so ordinary.

Brokeback Mountain is extraordinary because it is so ordinary.

Big fucking deal.

Your movie lost.

My movie lost too.

But you don't hear me slandering the people who voted against it.