Remember how when we heard that Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger were going to be in a gay cowboy movie we all snickered?
Remember how when we heard Heath Ledger was gonna play The Joker we all groaned and rolled our eyes?
Who's laughing now?
I was at least a little bit prepared for the emotional gut punch this film was going to deliver because I managed to read Annie Proulx's original short story a couple months or so before the movie was released. Whatever giggle factor might have existed in the basic concept was completely undone by Proulx's coolly precise and yet absolutely tender prose. The emotional power comes from the story's pure and earnest simplicity. There's no irony there. No winking. This wasn't going to be a story about "gay cowboys," I realized. This was going to be a quiet tragedy about the limits we place on ourselves and how those limits can ultimately ruin our lives.
And then Ang Lee and screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Osanna got ahold of it and turned it into a bonafide friggin' epic. Once Ledger and Gyllenhaal arrived to breathe life into the characters, the stage was set for one of the best Hollywood films of the preceeding two decades or so.
I know it kind of became a joke with its plaintive, distinctive soundtrack, the "I wish I knew how to quit you" line, and all the "Brokeback to the Future" and "Brokeback of the Rings" parodies. But go back rewatch it and remind yourself how you felt the first time you saw it. If you don't cry by the end, then you're probably the type of person who kills and eats puppies in your spare time.
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