It's a Gay Shepherd Movie, not a Gay Cowboy Movie

Brokeback Mountain is a perfectly good movie, although I'm in no position to comment on whether its eight Oscar nominations speaks to its quality or is really just a sign that everything else was total shit this year. Going in, I was leaning toward the latter option, if only because two of the top-billed stars were Anne Hathaway and Heath Ledger, not two people I associate with quality. I should also know better than to conflate Oscar nominations with good filmmaking. If our heroes had been attacked by CGI-crafted mutant sheep or something, the film would be a shoe-in for 11 or 12 nominations.

Ledger is actually the best part of the movie. Everyone else is good too and the script is well considered. The pacing is a little ponderous for my tastes, but there were a lot of nice pictures of mountains, bears, wolves and sheep, so it could have been worse. I walked out wondering what exactly about that movie was supposed to appeal to the "Heartland," as some thought it would. I don't believe the Heartland is all that different from the major urban centers (Heart-less land???), so I never really believed that a story about love would mean more in one place that the other. Admittedly, I've been reading too much Mickey Kaus, so my thinking may be a little tainted by his. Kaus believes that left-wing commentators are blowing the movie up into a culture-changing event, in which the red states learn how to stop worrying and love the hot man-on-man action. I refuse to read anything into the film's gross. Anyone who looks at any population and sees monolithic thinking is intellectually dishonest. There are a few people in Hobbs, N.M. who would be predisposed to like this movie and they'll go see it. And there are people who won't be and they won't. I found nothing universal about Brokeback Mountain, just a well-acted movie about conflicted characters. That's hard enough to do.