What is the opposite of a pioneer, trendsetter, or forerunner? However you might define this, Julie and I are exhibit A. We may be the last people on the planet to have seen "Brokeback Mountain", but last night we stayed up well past our bedtimes and enjoyed some Oscar-worthy cinema (or so it was hyped).
Now before you begin nodding your head vigorously in agreement, let me tell you why I was disappointed. I don't object to the portrayal of homosexuality; I recognize there are those men who prefer men, and therefore making a film that chronicles such a thing seems to be in keeping with the time honored tradition of art-imitating-life. If I had a problem with art imitating those lives that I disagreed with, I wouldn't read about 90 percent of all of the books I read or listen to the majority of music that I enjoy, since, my artistic tastes tends towards the perverse at times.
What I objected to was the poor storeytelling of the writer and director. There is good art and bad art, and I feel confident saying that this was indeed the latter. In my limited understanding, great works of literature and film (though I am hardly an expert on either) major on the subtleties of dramatic moments. Dr. Cowan, my esteemed professor, always pointed back to the scene in Dostoevsky's The Devils, where Nastassya is standing next to the window as dawn is breaking through the window, hair slightly disheveled, and the strap of her dress hanging from her shoulder. With this attention to details, slight as they may be in stature, the reader imagines exactly what took place with she and Stavrogin the night before. Or take the example of Milton's Paradise Lost, still burned fresh in my memory, where Adam and Eve's sexual encounters are described as "strange noises" and nothing more. Is there any doubt what was happening? In the death of Anna in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, is there a need for gory detail? Instead of describing the flesh being torn from her, he describes a "candle flickering and burning out forever".
What "Brokeback Mountain" forgot was subtlety. Would it have been less of a movie without passionate sexual scenes? I argue it would have been brilliant. The story itself is worthy of great film, because it deals with subject matter that has been untouched by artistic-hands at large. Contrasting the stereotypical-masculine and the undeniably-feminine in one person is something that the great authors and directors would be proud to create, but it was cheapened to a second-rate-romance-novel-gone-awry by being gratuitous.
So, I say, "Shame on the director." Shame, not for dealing in unpopular subject matter, for that I applaud you, but for doing it so poorly. You had a chance to make great cinema, but you settled for the popular.
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