Brokeback Mountain

Two range hands (Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger) form a personal and sexual attachment that consumes them for the next 20 years, even as they marry and try to fit into society. Director Ang Lee’s so-called “gay cowboy movie” (written by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana from the story by Annie Proulx) can be read as a love story of two men oppressed by society or as a tale of the same two men clinging to an adolescent crush while their “real” lives—wives, kids, jobs and family—wither on the vine. Either way, the sense is of lives sadly wasted (for whatever reason), and Lee gives it the heartsick ring of truth. Performances are excellent, especially by Anne Hathaway and Michelle Williams as the men’s disregarded wives; Williams, baffled and wounded, plays the most interesting character in the film.