On Brokeback.

I admit, my flippant 'review' of Brokeback Mountain the other night was written just moments after I got home, and before I had a chance to fully grasp the movie, which I did yesterday.

Despite all of the reviews I read and comments I heard, I was still expecting the movie to be almost solely a love story about these two men; I knew the movie went on for a period of two decades, and that the wives and family would be integral as well, but I predicted the relationship between Jack and Ennis to be where everything developed. Well, what I realized yesterday was that while their story is of course central to the movie, the real strength of Brokeback lies in the periphery, in that relationship between the men and their families, and to society at large. The scenes with Alma (Michelle Williams) were so arresting that they haunted me for hours; the breakdown of Cassie, knowing that she'll never understand what lies inside Ennis, is a slug to the gut.

The more I thought about the last half-hour of the movie, the more I appreciated the work of Ang Lee in structuring it the way he did. To watch Ennis' daughter still come back to him, to see the struggle on the faces of Jack's parents, to listen to the phone conversation between Ennis and Lureen was to see cinema at its finest; I believe each of those scenes showed the true nature of Jack and Ennis' relationship more than any of their scenes together.

Well now I really feel like a jackass for my first comments, but my gut reaction remains the same: as far as emotional, wrenching romantic stories between two protagonists, I've seen better. But for a film that goes this deep into love and its ripple effects, this will be hard to top.