Not once do our heroes mention the word love, nor does any shame or harshness attach to their desire. Rumor had it that “Brokeback Mountain” was an explicit piece of work, and I was surprised by its tameness, although Lee’s helplessly good taste, which has proved both a gift and a curb, was always going to lure him away from sweating limbs and toward the coupling of souls. One evening, a drunken Ennis shares Jack’s tent, and, in the heat of a cold night, there is a breathy, wordless unbuckling of belts.

(Does any director still have the patience to let our gaze rest without skittering upon the Western landscape?) On the other hand, you could argue that such transience sets the tone-at once wondrous and fleeting-for the rest of the movie, and that, if Ennis and Jack have fashioned a rough and rainy Eden for themselves, it is a paradise waiting to be lost. Lee wants to suggest the savoring of time, yet the camera tends to alight on ravishing formations of rock and cloud, grab them, and then move on, as if we were shuffling through a pile of photographs. This is the most gorgeous part of the movie, and the least successful, partly because an idyll is less an event than a state of being. Both are hired for the summer, to tend the flocks on Brokeback Mountain, and that is where we follow them for the first, idyllic act of their story. Sergio Leone’s men were waiting for a train these boys are falling in love.Īt last, we learn their names: Ennis del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal). There is something wired and wary in their silence, and the entire passage can be read not only as an echo of “Once Upon a Time in the West,” whose opening hummed with a similar suspense, but also as an unimaginable change of tune.

Another fellow, barely more than a kid, turns up in a coughing old truck and joins the waiting game both are in search of a job. A cowboy stands against a wall in Signal, Wyoming, his hat tipped down as if he were falling asleep. The first scene is a master class in the dusty and the taciturn, with gusts of wind doing all the talking. The new Ang Lee film, “Brokeback Mountain,” is a love story that starts in 1963 and never ends.

Brokeback mountain story