Brokeback Mountain - The Burbanked Oscar Nominee Review

As we count down the final days to Hollywood’s Big Night of Backslapping, the Best Picture Crash vs. Brokeback debate continues and continues some more. So we figure it’s as great a time as any - and also because we’re embarassingly only now getting around to it - to take another look at Ang Lee’s moving, textured, heartbreaking, so-good-just-leave-your-hangups-outside romance/tragedy Brokeback Mountain. And it is great - but is it Best Picture Great, if such a thing exists in a post-Chicago America?

Read the Burbanked Brokeback Mountain Oscar-season movie review after the jump.

(I figure it’s safe to assume you’ve landed here because you’re feeding your Oscar buzz, not because you’re actually contemplating the Burbanked opinion before you choose to see Brokeback for the first time. Therefore, spoilers will follow. Please read with caution if you haven’t for some reason seen this yet.)

In the Burbanked Oscar Nominee Review of Crash, I commented that Haggis’ film does a decent job of teaching us more about the things that we already know, as opposed to opening our eyes to those things within us of which we were unaware. Brokeback Mountain is, in many ways, the exact opposite. Brokeback goes far into making us believe in its characters, making us think deeply and feel even more deeply the sadness of a life unfulfilled by love - but this is barely a function of characters who are, by narrative circumstance, homosexual. If we haven’t already, let’s get the “gay cowboy” thing out of the way now; Brokeback is first and foremost a story that resonates in our collective consciousness; only the most steadfastly closed-off viewer can still claim it to be orientation-specific. There’s no more reason to resist the strength of its storytelling than there is, say, to disbelieve that men can fly in spaceships and duel with lightsabers. Brokeback Mountain offers true emotional impact, a deeply-felt look into the heart, and manages to touch universally on emotions and themes that stick with you long after the lights have come up. If Crash is a low-carb snack that you’re proud of yourself for choosing, Brokeback is the six-course meal that is far more satisfying.

Any filmmaker worth his or her salt can make you cry. Cinematic manipulation of the emotions is as timeworn as Eisenstein, so it ceases to be impressive when the movies merely move us or trigger sympathy. True filmmakers use their art to transcend the parlor trick, to produce deeper inspirations in our hearts, to compel us to run home and hug our kids and overwhelm them with reflections on life and love and regret and hope. Ang Lee accomplishes all of this and more with Brokeback, and perhaps the most impressive thing is how transparent he is in the creation of it. We tend to see a director’s brand on a movie, whether it’s Spielbergian Lighting, the Scorsese Tracking Shot or the economy of the Eastwood Method. Lee disappears into his movies, letting the story dictate how it needs to be told. Take someone unfamiliar with his work and show them Sense and Sensibility, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Brokeback and I’ll bet they’d never guess that these were made by the same person. With admiring respect for Spielberg and the rest, there is great strength to be found in the storytelling skills of the non-auteur. As moviegoers, it’s too easy for us to wait and watch for the comfort of our favorite directors’ familiar tricks - but when we do, we’re no longer involved in the story, only the telling of it. Despite its failure on a number of levels - both earned and not - Lee’s Hulk is arguably among the best-realized comic book movies in the use of truly impressive and innovative narrative tools to recreate the feeling of reading a comic book. We should require our movies to make us feel, profoundly and overwhelmingly so. Lazy, on-the-nose filmmaking that results from laborious studio development is all too often the norm anymore - and we are too willing to accept it. Lee shows us how it should be done here. He’s one of our great filmmakers not because he hits so many homeruns, but because of his willingness to swing, and swing hard each time he’s at bat.

And Brokeback Mountain is as impressive a homerun as we’re likely to find. It has an immersive sense of time and place, examining lives we know nothing about in a world where we’ve never been before. It has a complexity of story and character that is woven throughout the film - down to its smallest details and supporting characters (look no further than the brief, heartbreaking work by Roberta Maxwell as Jack’s mother). It has what all Best Pictures should have: a remarkable sense of discipline and less-is-more storytelling. How incredibly refreshing it is to not know the entire story of Jack’s death - and to not see the Big Movie Moment when Ennis realizes the truth. What a joy it is for a movie to approach the hackneyed Dead Main Character’s Ashes plot point - only to then turn it on its head and deny the character (and us) the cinematic (but by now numbingly boring) catharsis of seeing the ashes scattered to the wind. These are the marks of confident artists and true filmmakers where we are surprised and emotionally devastated by the narrative choices they’ve made. This idea may horrify those who have to develop and market these movies, but informed film fans actually don’t want everything resolved in their stories. We actually want to think, feel, fill in the blanks and apply the lessons learned by the characters to our own lives - and we can only do that when the filmmakers don’t telegraph every plot moment, every emotion and every resolution and cram them down our throats from the first teaser trailer through fade to black.

And yes, these are the marks of a Best Picture. Go back and watch The Apartment, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Godfather(s) again. See how the strength is so often found in what’s not said, what we don’t see, where the film is allowed to breath and expand into our own consciousness and life experiences - especially if our experiences are so different than what’s portrayed in the movie, as is the case with Brokeback. Of course we’re still living in a time where you have to be at least open to the idea of a homosexual love story before you enter the theater. But Lee, screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, and (probably in large part) producer James Schamus have done much more than just the heavy lifting here. They’ve created a film that transcends the specifics of its characters’ lives to paint its truths and themes on a much bigger canvas - and have created both a controversy and a societal bellwether at the same time. That’s an artistic accomplishment that truly defines the title “Best Picture” - because if it doesn’t, we might find ourselves telling Hollywood, “I wish I knew how to quit you!”