Brokeback: brilliant, boring or bad?

Now that the uproar at Brokeback Mountain missing out in the "Oscars" is slowly dying down, I thought this might be an appropriate time for me to add my two-cents worth on the movie. I actually only saw it last Friday (deep in the dungeons of Greater Union George Street, Sydney) and I must say I was looking forward to it.

I came out of it disappointed and a little bit disturbed.

The movie was promoted, unofficially if not officially, as a "gay love story". Well, it was in a way, but it was not a gay romance, it was a romantic tragedy: a very different thing indeed.

In any tragedy, whether a novel or a movie, the plot hinges around a decision made early in the piece. At a critical juncture the hero/protaganist is forced to undertake an action or make a choice, and for one reason or another takes the wrong one. Very often the choice made is hushing up a crime - or committing one. From then on things spiral out of control as one thing after another fails to make up for that first wrong decision, until their destruction is the only possible ending.

In this context the word wrong is important, because it carries two connotations. The first is simply that the choice is incorrect (in that an alternative choice would have led to a more satisfactory outcome), but more importantly it implies morally wrong.

This is where Brokeback Mountain becomes problematic, because the action that Jack and Ennis "undertake" is to fall in love. As a tragedy all further actions follow from this decision which must therefore be considered the wrong one - if it were the right thing to do, how could things have (not) worked out the way they did? Therefore, although a charitable interpretation might be that the choice was "wrong" in a soft way ("wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time"), the stigma of moral wrong-ness still remains.

American writer/director Don Roos, interviewed in the Sydney Star Observer (2 March 2005) makes the comment that he feels Brokeback Mountain is an "anti-gay" movie because it reinforces the notion that to be gay is to be miserable and lonely. While I wouldn't use those words, I think I do agree with him.

On another level, Roos and others have commented that the movie is pretty much a copy of an earlier movie Same Time Next Year, except with gay leads. While I have not seen that particular movie, I do feel Brokeback is very derivative. For example, the shirt scene towards the very end, while certainly tugging at the heart strings, has definitely been done before. The example that springs to my mind is the scene "Name Removed" in the musical "Quilt" (when all that is left of a relationship is shirt material that a court has ordered be removed from the AIDS memorial quilt). I also get regular echoes of Ray Lawler's Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. In a slightly clunky flashback late in the movie where a young Ennis riding off on horseback into the mountains morphs into a middle aged Ennis pointing his ute along a gravel road, I hear Olive's cry of "I want what I had before ... give me back what you've taken" as another 17-year periodic romance crumbles to dust. It works emotionally, but in 2006 is melodramatic and hardly original.

The actors I must say I don't mind at all - although admittedly I do have a bit of a soft spot as far as Heath Ledger is concerned, and personally I felt the aging/time going by changes were handled well. Still, this is not enough to save the movie.

I have come to the conclusion that I'm not a fan of director Ang Lee. I remember being absorbed by The Ice Storm, but since then I have found Crouching Tiger - Hidden Dragon boring and Hulk a load of tosh. I'm afraid I have to add Brokeback Mountain to the list of disappointments.

So is Brokeback brilliant, boring or bad? I'd definitely say it isn't brilliant, it is sometimes boring, but I wouldn't go so far as to say bad.

Borderline I think.