Have you seen these men? Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain (Photo: Focus Features)

Part of me does not even want to write about Brokeback Mountain. It is the part that figures you have heard everything there is to be said about it--Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal portray cowboys in love. Ang Lee directs them. Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway play their respective wives. Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana adapted the screenplay from Annie Proulx's prize-winning short story. In the service of clinical, yet junk sciences like award-season prognostications and cultural glory, Focus Features has underwritten not just a film, but the provision of a lab rat irresistible to film writers desperate for new phenomena.

And ostensibly in the service of their readership, those writers raced to deliver the perceptions that would demonstrate their alacrity with a scalpel. Rapturous buzz surfaced from festivals in Venice and Telluride by Labor Day. David Poland waved it off not once, but twice by the end of September. The hype machine whirred into subsonic range early last month when standing-room-only press screenings yielded one exegesis after another--take the New York Observer's Choire Sicha, who wrote that "Brokeback Mountain dismisses contemporary, over-therapized, narcissistic questions about love. ... (O)ne of New York's most jaded reporters admitted (after a screening) that he found it impossible to be cynical about the film--and this admission was somehow even more shocking than tears." The Hollywood Reporter's Anne Thompson broke down the commercial mechanics of gay tragedy, while Caryn James crapped out a fags-fighting-for-Oscars trend piece that wound up influencing hackwork from The Telegraph to Liz Smith and beyond. Now Ledger and Gyllenhaal are on the cover of Entertainment Weekly and profiled in Newsweek--middlebrow organs of mediocre taste that never wavered from the wider mission to just get this movie.

And now you get me, straggling into the mix like the forlorn bastard playing an empty room at the end of open-mic night. I mean, I liked Brokeback Mountain, and I have plenty I could tell you about how faithfully adapted and beautifully acted it is. Like I said, though, you have heard all that before. You know it presents the relationship between Ennis Del Mar (Ledger) and Jack Twist (Gyllenhaal), who embark on a doomed 20-year love affair while working as ranchhands in Wyoming. You know that it cuts its poetry with heartbreak, its power with prurience. But forget how intimate and graphic Ennis's and Jack's sex is. In overwhelmingly perceiving Brokeback Mountain as a revolutionary gay love story, the breathless critical apparatus overlooks the nuances that make this as basic and relatable a romance as Romeo and Juliet. Ang Lee has not made a movie about men and men, or men and women--he has made a movie about souls.

"Sometimes I think it's of great importance, and sometimes I think I just opened a can of worms," Lee told The Reeler on a recent visit to New York. "The movie is indeed a provocation. ... Society has all kinds of thoughts, and thoughts get generated that are very different. They are not in unison, and they're coming from all different directions. They're bigger than the movie. I sort of have to live through it and handle it. I don't have all the answers, because most people want quick answers."

You almost feel sorry for the guy, even as you are thankful that he got the job over the previously attached Joel Schumacher and Gus Van Sant (the latter of whom showed up at McMurtry's door within a week of the script being sent out in 1998). In filming Brokeback as a "period piece in a timeless place," as he puts it, Lee alludes to both the West and the Western with a trademark versatility better suited to the story's sprawling Western revisionism. His Wyoming and Texas are the flat, true West of Proulx's story, with Brokeback Mountain itself rising out of the plains as the exception to the rule. The realm is populated by genre characters whose silence is as indicative of alienation as it is of community.

But set in the context of the West's archetypes of sexuality and masculinity, Ennis's own reticence does not just imbue him with the cowboy tradition. It totally paralyzes his ability to express love. "I wanted that to come out of his mouth," Ledger said last weekend, buzzing with endearing nervous energy. "I think any form of expression had to be painful. I wanted him to be a clenched fist, and therefore my mouth became a clenched fist. I wanted the words to be punching their way out. I just wanted it to be very hard for him. And I thought it would it would be a subtle tool for aging him. For Ennis, the difference between 20 and 40, physically, is very slight. And also for Ennis emotionally, he never really aged, either. He didn't progress in any way. He was just fixed his entire life, and that's part of his tragedy."

As Ennis, Ledger's performance is one of 2005's great revelations--the wounded outcast you could see him killing after Monster's Ball but had to wonder if he would ever have an opportunity to revisit after misfires like The Four Feathers, The Brothers Grimm and The Lords of Dogtown. In silencing Ennis, Ledger evokes a range of wonder, horror and regret that Jack Twist can only counter with a series of over-earnest rationalizations. Of course, at least Jack knows he is gay, which represents a tragically ironic advantage; you come to imagine that Ennis would give anything for at least the security of identity, no matter how potentially deadly the consequences that he has witnessed firsthand. But Ennis's denial is more hardwired than his sexuality. After all, it is not out of proclivity but fantasy that he abruptly turns his wife Alma on her stomach before sex.

Although Ennis wants and loves Jack, one would be oversimplifying things to argue that Ennis's biggest problem is the homosexual burden that the West hands down among its perennial myths. The bottom line here is that the guy cannot claim the love of his life; the name Jack Twist provides the central symbol of this dynamic. "I don’t want to say it's not a gay story or not a gay relationship," Ledger explained. "Because it is. There would be a lot of people who be really upset if we took that away from the film, because that's what it is. But the point is also bigger than that. It's representing love on a much bigger scale. So unfortunately society likes to label things, and I think this exceeds that label. The short story did that."

Prepare the backlash

Indeed, as Lee and Ledger internalized Brokeback Mountain on the set in Alberta, so did screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana as they adapted Proulx's work in Texas. Their collaboration represents another, perhaps more genuinely sad reality--far more tragic than Ennis's blockaded love and naturally ignored by those lab-coat-clad critics responsible for it: In all the hype, Brokeback viewers are denied the narrative wallop that attended Proulx's story when The New Yorker published it in 1997. Ennis's and Jack's first, stunning sexual tryst appears as suddenly in Lee's film as it does in Proulx's story, and it is adapted just as faithfully as the landscape and language. Their coupling is almost like a duel, all loud silence and grappling, ecstatic kinesis.

Bless her heart, Ossana disagrees with me. "I read (the story) in the middle of the night," she said. "When I woke up the next morning, I read it again. Even though I knew exactly what was going to happen, I was even more affected by it the second time I read it. 'Oh my God.' Because again, what I began to see were all the layers--the various layers in the story. The women, Ennis's clenched, terrified self. Jack's tragic love for this man. I began to see the richness of it, and also the possibility."

OK, but what about the hype? You have literally classic source material, a cast and crew comprising A-list talent and everybody firing on all cylinders to make a film that survives the intellectual challenge of crossing over from movie reviews to op-eds. I mean--what the hell is that like?

"We have been very lucky here, I think," Ossana told me. "I mean, sure it took eight years to get made, but all so the right elements came together and clicked. We all had sort of the same vision--we have kind of a collective, hypnotized vision, like we were drinking the same Kool-Aid or whatever. And it was really amazing to me. I feel like we're very lucky."

Focus Features boss James Schamus agreed as only a producer can. "I think part of it was the low budget," he said. "It forced everybody into these small little quarters. Like literally. You don't have the big trailer, you know? And so there was a real sense of a communal effort. On the bigger films, you know, you have all the best people doing great jobs. But they're doing their job. On this there was more of a sense of a real kind of communal experience. Which doesn't happen very often. This was the most fun movie we've ever had to make."

Which is only a little ironic considering its tragedy, right?

"It's funny," Schamus replied, smiling. "Most of the great comedies are made by people who are having nervous breakdowns. It's weirdly vice versa. We were all making this horribly tragic, moving experience, and yet sheep jokes abound."

So while the critical canon may not be any more enriched by another entry in the Brokeback Mountain Science Fair, I take solace in having extracted the first sheep reference. If only it could compare with the humble resonance of Lee's deference to McMurtry and Proulx ("I've never been so loyal to a book. Maybe it's because they are legendary writers who are very alive to me."), or Michelle Williams's quiet admission, "It's amazing to be a part of something where Heath and I walk down the street and men just come up and say thanks." Sure, it is a little bit off-putting. But like everything else about Brokeback Mountain, it is the thought that counts.