With Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee paints...symbolist drama (is it coincidental that the film begins in Signal, Wyoming?).
Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:226
Fresh:195
Rotten:31
Average Rating:8.1/10
Consensus: A beautifully epic Western, Brokeback Mountain's gay love story is embued with heartbreaking universality, helped by the moving performances of Ledger and Gyllenhaal.
Runtime: 2 hrs 15 mins
Genre: Dramas
Theatrical Release:Dec 9, 2005 Limited
Box Office: $82,970,165
Synopsis: From Academy Award-winning filmmaker Ang Lee comes an epic American love story, based on the short story by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Proulx and adapted for the screen by the team of... From Academy Award-winning filmmaker Ang Lee comes an epic American love story, based on the short story by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Proulx and adapted for the screen by the team of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. Set against the sweeping vistas of Wyoming and Texas, the film tells the story of two young men – a ranch-hand and a rodeo cowboy – who meet in the summer of 1963, and unexpectedly forge a lifelong connection, one whose complications, joys and tragedies provide a testament to the endurance and power of love. Early one morning in Signal, Wyoming, Ennis del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) meet while lining up for employment with local rancher Joe Aguirre (Randy Quaid). The world which Ennis and Jack have been born into is at once changing rapidly and yet scarcely evolving. Both young men seem certain of their set places in the heartland – obtaining steady work, marrying and raising a family – and yet hunger for something beyond what they can articulate. When Aguirre dispatches them to work as sheepherders up on the majestic Brokeback Mountain, they gravitate towards camaraderie and then a deeper intimacy. At summer's end, the two must come down from Brokeback and part ways. Remaining in Wyoming, Ennis weds his sweetheart Alma (Michelle Williams), with whom he will have two daughters as he ekes out a living. Jack, in Texas, catches the eye of a rodeo queen Lureen Newsome (Anne Hathaway). Their courtship and marriage result in a son, as well as jobs in her father's business. Four years pass. One day, Alma brings Ennis a postcard from Jack, who is en route to visit Wyoming. Ennis waits expectantly for his friend, and when Jack at last arrives, in just one moment it is clear that the passage of time has only strengthened the men's attachment. In the years that follow, Ennis and Jack struggle to keep their secret bond alive. They meet up several times annually. Even when they are apart, they face the eternal questions of fidelity, commitment and trust. Ultimately, the one constant in their lives is a force of nature – love. -- © Focus Features [More]
Starring: Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams, Anne Hathaway
Starring: Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams, Anne Hathaway, Randy Quaid, Linda Cardellini, Anna Faris, Valerie Planche
Director: Ang Lee
Director: Ang Lee
Screenwriter: Larry McMurtry, Diana Ossana
Producer: Diana Ossana, James Schamus
Composer: Gustavo Santaolalla
Studio: Focus Features
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Reviews for Brokeback Mountain
A heartbreaking, groundbreaking love story -- and it won our hearts as one of the best flicks of the year.
Ang Lee conveys maddening delirium rendered in the way one man’s eyes gaze at another’s, and then look away, and the looking-away amounts to the murder of two souls as surely as if they’d drawn guns and hit each other in the heart.
Brokeback is an incredible piece of direction, even for Lee, who has made a career out of impressive cinema.
Pretty terrific stuff by any measure, full of detailed characterizations and unashamed, misty-eyed sentiment that pushes precisely the right buttons.
Tells an emotionally powerful forbidden love story with taste and intelligence.
By excessively compensating with how molds are being shattered, many viewers may overlook the fact that the same material could have made using heterosexual protagonists.
Foremost about a love that can never break out of its societal prison.
Brokeback Mountain takes great pains to be a compassionate love story; but the filmmaking itself, self-consciously restrained and desiccated, is inert and inexpressive.
Ang Lee's formalism is so extreme that it's often laughable, and the sex is depicted as a holy union: Gay love has never been so sacred.
It's a deeply felt, emotional love story that deals with the uncharted, mysterious ways of the human heart just as so many mainstream films have before it. The two lovers here just happen to be men.
Annie Proulx's heartbreaking story of two cowboys who fall in love has been faithfully translated onto the screen in Ang Lees landmark film.
Heath Ledger's extraordinary. . . though Lee's passion for this project seems several degrees cooler.
What is truly distinctive about Brokeback Mountain is that it brings to life a love story that, after all these years of love stories, is essentially new to mainstream movies, and it does so without special pleading or sentimentality.
[The film] is directed by Ang Lee in a style that pays attention to the nuances of expression, to the thoughts and emotions being articulated between the words and in the pauses.
It's such a slow burn that you likely won't even smell the fire until after it has surrounded you... measured subtlety makes this simple story an emotional masterpiece.
The movie is too tame and too clumsy to be worth much outside its "groundbreaking" status.
Brokeback Mountain is at once the gayest and the least gay Hollywood film I’ve seen, which is another way of saying that Lee has a knack for culling universality from the most specific identities.
Brokeback Mountain coaxes audiences to walk several hundred miles in its characters' shoes, luring us with the scent of forbidden fruit and rewarding us with the sumptuous taste of complex storytelling.
Lee has managed to capture more than lavish backdrops and romantic sentimentalities and arrives at the end of the film with a sad reflection on love fought for and lost.
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January 22, 2008:
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Heath Ledger, star of films including Brokeback Mountain, 10 Things I Hate About You, and the forthcoming The Dark Knight, was found dead this afternoon. He was 28. More...
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