GAY OSCARS

[wertz]

I came across an entry in Obsidian Wings' blog yesterday on the potential Academy Awards nominations of Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, which raised an interesting point, but spawned an excellent satiric response. First, the blog (excerpted):

Why is Jake Gylllenhaal being nominated for "Best Supporting Actor" in "Brokeback Mountain" by

Comments

Re: Landmark film??

[wertz]

Sorry, I didn't see this until now. Not to counter your opinion, but to clarify my own:

And as for the adaptation of the short story. I, personally, was thankfully to lose lines like "gun's going off".
Difference between us, I guess. The line itself isn't highly pertinent, but its expression of the visceral, physical nature of the relatonship is. Sure, the film had tenderness and warmth in subdued abundance, but I had no sense of the fact that we all experience the world through our bodies, Ennis and Jacl included. I could read their pain in every seciond frame, but I never smelled their sweat - and the short story is moving not because it's some sort of frustrated valentine, but because what is being thwarted exists on the most primal level, based on the deepest desire.

But, i think overall, the film stayed remarkablely true to essence & heart her short story, which i think is beautifully conveyed in [the] passage below...
The "hunger" that Ennis remembers in your quote may be "sexless", but it is distinctly physical nonetheless. The next image is of the union of their two bodies as "a single column". He remembers Jack's breath, his rocking motion, his heartbeat - not some disembodied sense of well-being. The film may live up to your quoted paragraphs devoid of context, but to me it didn't live up to the final sentence of the penultimate paragraph:

And he would wake sometimes in grief, sometimes with the old sense of joy and relief; the pillow sometimes wet, sometimes the sheets.
Ledger and Lee captured the pillow, but not the sheets. You will doubtless read this as me saying "There wasn't enough sex." Not in the least. There wasn't enough sense that these two men ever [i]had[/i] sex.

As to Ledger's palpably creative, artistic conflict/pain, well... there was a lot of taciturn acting, but it succeeded only as an independent character study, not as part of the unfolding of a relationship.

Bottom line: The short story has moved me to tears each time I've read it. It has tugged at my own senses of loss and pain and compassion and rage. I cannot say the same for the film.