Brokeback Mountain Review

Ang Lee lets the first act run almost wordless, and that patience is what the rest of the film lives on. Rodrigo Prieto shoots the Alberta ranges standing in for Wyoming in wide, cold light that keeps the two men small inside it, and Gustavo Santaolalla's guitar figure does work a score usually has to argue for. Heath Ledger builds Ennis out of a clenched jaw and swallowed consonants, a man so frightened of his own sentences that he barely finishes them, and Jake Gyllenhaal plays Jack as the one willing to say the thing aloud, which makes him the more exposed of the two.

Michelle Williams gets the single best shot in the picture, watching through a doorway and then going back inside to set the table. The back half strains. Twenty years pass in ellipses, the aging makeup and the moustaches are not convincing, and the Texas in-laws never become people. Randy Quaid vanishes after the first hour and nothing replaces the pressure he supplied. What survives is the shirts in the closet, and the refusal to explain them.