Better than the book
Sunday, 8 January 2006 22:31![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krisomniacSavour this moment, because I won't say it often, but Brokeback Mountain was better as a movie than a short story.
There are times I'm glad to be neither eloquent nor verbose. Words might spoil the simple and understated message in Ang Lee's movie.
There is a single musical theme whose few notes begin major and rise into a hollow minor twang. Every time your ear expects a resolution, the chord falls just short, and yet the music tells the story of these two men as eloquently as the images onscreen. There is snow in July.
Jack (Gyllenhal) asks his questions with big blue eyes that wrinkle and sag as over the years he learns the answers. Ennis (Ledger) conveys more emotion with a stuttering swallow than most actors can manage to say with a monologue.
There are rocky mountainsides, crystalline lakes, and beat-up, rusted out trucks. The pace is slow and lazy and yet manages to span a lifetime in two hours.
There is a message hidden in quick-cut flashbacks, a social agenda that is felt rather than stated. There are sheep (which I will forever think of as 'woolies'), empty bottles of whisky, and broken men.
The movie is not romantic, edgy, daring, or even all that beautiful*. Though it follows the book -- sometimes word for word --
it's something better.
*except for the mountains
There are times I'm glad to be neither eloquent nor verbose. Words might spoil the simple and understated message in Ang Lee's movie.
There is a single musical theme whose few notes begin major and rise into a hollow minor twang. Every time your ear expects a resolution, the chord falls just short, and yet the music tells the story of these two men as eloquently as the images onscreen. There is snow in July.
Jack (Gyllenhal) asks his questions with big blue eyes that wrinkle and sag as over the years he learns the answers. Ennis (Ledger) conveys more emotion with a stuttering swallow than most actors can manage to say with a monologue.
There are rocky mountainsides, crystalline lakes, and beat-up, rusted out trucks. The pace is slow and lazy and yet manages to span a lifetime in two hours.
There is a message hidden in quick-cut flashbacks, a social agenda that is felt rather than stated. There are sheep (which I will forever think of as 'woolies'), empty bottles of whisky, and broken men.
The movie is not romantic, edgy, daring, or even all that beautiful*. Though it follows the book -- sometimes word for word --
it's something better.
*except for the mountains
