Heartbreak Ridge
Fobidden love on the lone prairie in haunting 'Brokeback Mountain'

Ang Lee's poignant Brokeback Mountain, about two itinerant ranch hands who fall in love during a summer herding sheep in the Wyoming mountains, is more than just a hot-button issue movie. Set back in the pre-Stonewall Dark Ages (1963) when same-sex romance was considered "the love that dare nor speak its name," it's a haunting love story that will appeal to anyone who has ever loved and lost. And yet the fearlessness with which Lee and stars Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal bring a male love story into mainstream movies may mark a turning point in the way gay lives are depicted onscreen.

The protagonists meet signing up for seasonal work with a testy sheep rancher. Ennis Del Mar (the outstanding Ledger), an orphan raised by siblings, doesn't say much; his lowered eyes and hunched posture suggest a closed-up, locked-down wariness that expects nothing more from life than more hard knocks. Jack Twist (Gyllenhaal) is more open and talkative. He's also the more experienced sheep herder, having worked the job before, between stints riding bulls in the rodeo.

Their time on the mountain is marked by glorious scenery, harsh camping conditions, and ennui, until Jack gradually coaxes a friendship out of Ennis. Struggling through the season together by working as a team, they're obliged to share a tent one frozen night, where their relationship turns suddenly, clumsily physical. Then evolves into something else again. After assuring each other and themselves that they "ain't queer," Ennis and Jack find in each other a respite and freedom neither has felt before in his previous life. They don't know what to call it, and as the season ends and they go their separate ways there's no way to hang onto it—not in Marlboro Country, where the abiliy to herd, hunt, ride, and kill is the measure of manliness, and any perceived deviation from that path can get a fellow killed.

But Ennis and Jack's deepening bond colors their lives over the next 20 years. Ennis marries Alma (Michelle Williams), and struggles to do right by her and his new daughters on a ranch hand's salary. Jack catches the eye of a sassy rodeo queen (Anne Hathaway), who sets him up in the tractor business operated by her daddy, an antagonistic blowhard who treats Jack as little more than a stud bull once he's produced the old man's requisite grandchild. But as resigned as both Jack and Ennis think they are to their new lives, a reunion years later leads to annual fishing trips together up on the mountain—alienating them helplessly from the half-lives they share with their increasigly disappointed wives.

Lee skillfully traps the audience, like the men themselves, in the culture of dusty, dying western towns, cheap honky-tonks and empty machismo from which they can't escape. Their only chance to breathe is in stolen moments together back on the mountain, where the serenity of the natural world and the wide open spaces mirror their momentary release from the prison of their other lives. And what they sacrifice and compromise in themelves and their lives for those moments makes for a powerful, yet restrained ballad of longing, lost opportunities, and the perils of a life lived divided from one's true self.

While all the actors are exceptional, this movie contains the performance of the year from Heath Ledger. Overwhelmed by loneliness, with no language skills to convey the enormity of his feelings, his Ennis is an aching masterpiece of abject self-containment.

BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN With Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal and Michelle Williams. Written by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. From the story by E. Annie Proulx. Directed by Ang Lee. A Focus Features release. Rated R. 126 minutes. (****)