June 14, 2004
You're too much for me, Ennis, you son of a whore-son bitch. I wish I knew how to quit you.
I read Anne Proulx's 'Brokeback Mountain' last night. It's a sparse story, cold and sad, set in the sixties and the decades afterwards but feeling like something lost in time. Its a love story, and it deals heavily in intolerance, but both issues are sketched with negative space, never mentioned explicitly.
There's sex in it too; the two cowboys scarcely know how to express their feelings otherwise, at least at first. There's been some controversy over reports that Ang Lee, who is currently directing the film version with Jake Gyllenhall and Heath Ledger, from an adaptation by Larry McMurtry, has chosen to take a non gratuitous approach to the love scenes; chickening out, in other words. There's a point there, except that this isn't a mainstream movie we're talking about; this isn't about audiences wanting Jennifer Aniston to end up with the gay guy. I'd wager that if a consummate artist like Lee makes a choice to be nonexplicit, then it's a tasteful one, for the good of the film, and the finished product will be no less honest or powerful because of it. And if the page of screenplay that's surfaced online, containing the first sex scene between the characters and written almost verbatim from the tex in the book, is accurate, then it's all a moot point anyway: Lee's going to merely be staying true to the source material, which is entirely appropriate. I have confidence that Lee will make an amazing film out of this (as opposed to the hope, not quite met, that I had for Hulk), and that it might even break down some barriers; I hope people can think outside of the box and trust him to make a great movie without worrying about whether the two movie stars will get it on.
Although if they do, it'll be pretty sexy. Gyllenhall and Ledger as gay cowboys? Come on, don't tell that doesn't sound attractive.
Now I'm going to take this opportunity to take the high road and not make the obvious South Park reference.
Also last night, I spent some time trying to find a store that had a copy of Linklater's Before Sunrise, which I'd never seen, so that I could spend the next twelve hours forming some approximation of the attachment my friends who have seen it feel to it. No one had it, although I only went to three retail locations and refused to step foot into Blockbuster.
So I went ahead and watched the sequel, Before Sunset, this morning, and I loved it. Truly loved it. It felt like a conversation I want to have with someone. That I've wanted to have many times before, and that I'll probably still want to have in ten years. It's been a long time since I felt that a movie was stealing words from my head before I could say them myself.
The entire movie is a real-time conversation, but there's one physical moment that Julie Delpy has, a gesture she makes, that almost made me break down on cue.
I'll have to wait until I see the first film, which I imagine will now hold no ambiguity for me, before I write my review. Hopefully I can dig up a copy.
I had another moment recently where I felt intrinsically linked to some piece of art; the night of the screening, or morning actually, since I didn't get home until almost six, I was laying in bed and drifting off to Morrissey's new album. The best song, Come Back To Camden, was playing, and suddenly I got that feeling, the one I used to have all the time before my body isolated my romantic streak and started to form a cynical shell around it, that this song was about me. I was in a particular mood, and it just hit me, and maybe that's what left me so open to Before Sunrise. Or maybe, and more likely, it's just because it (the movie) is so well made, in all regards. That's what great art does, and that it can do that is what makes art so great.
Posted by David Lowery at June 14, 2004 1:09 AM