Leah and I saw Brokeback Mountain a while back. It was O.K. Leah enjoyed it quite a bit.
I tried to go into the theater with an open mind, not so much because I had a problem with the relatively graphic depictions of rump ridin’ (see? I’m down with gay cowboy slang), but because the film had by that time accumulated this disturbing critical mass (pun intended…no really) that you don’t normally see outside of the Oprah Book Club. No film with that kind of buzz could ever live up to the hype.
In the end, I was disappointed (and I wasn’t the only one, eh, Jack? *wink, wink*). The film was very pretty. The actors did better-than-passable work (I was particularly struck by Michelle Williams as Alma Del Mar). But I walked out afterwards with a distinct impression that the screenplay had been mishandled somehow. It just seemed to be too much story for the confines of the film I’d just watched (ironic, in a way, given the story’s original format).
I’d put the experience behind me until yesterday, when Leah related an amusing/sad episode she’d had following a meeting at work. As luck would have it, she struck up a conversation about Brokeback with three very liberal women and one very conservative woman. The conservative woman, in a moment of righteous indignation that obviously overcame any internal warnings she may have felt about spouting off in front of her liberal boss, said she found the depictions of gay sex in the movie “disgusting” “nauseating.”
Ooookay. ANYway. Meeting’s over! I sure don’t fault this woman for expressing her opinion about the movie’s content, but golly gee whiz, you’d think she’d take more care in flapping her gums in a place that once canned a woman for speaking out against sticky mousetraps.