Brokeback Mountain
#6 in my movie challenge for the year was Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, which I saw in a theater rather than at home. A lot of people have gone to a lot of trouble to protest that this isn’t a movie about gay lovers. Actually, yes, it is. It is also a universal story about doomed love in a disapproving society. But the lovers are doomed because they’re cowboys in the 1960s. This movie is beautiful to look at, and strongly acted, particularly by Heath Ledger. It had a couple of nice ambiguities. One of them wasn’t how Ledger’s character’s wife found out, though. That happened too quickly and too definitely. It would have had more power if her discovery would have built over time. The subtlety of the rest of the film more than made up for this one detail, though.