Contraversial Gay Cowboy Movie!

Thus have I seen Brokeback Mountain.
Kenya, Jess, Yuki (I can never remember her name)and I went and saw it the other night. Not surprisingly, Jess clearly enjoyed it (This is a woman who watches Gravitation and has a "got yaoi?" pin).
My take on it is as follows.
First of all, Heath Ledger was brilliant. It first I thought he was overdoing, but by the end of the movie he is so in character the viewer forgets he's Heath Ledger. I never really had much respect for him as an actor, but God in Heaven, he was incredible. Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams, and Anne Hathaway were all also really good.
The story itself wasn't bad, either - simpler than I had expected. Ennis (Ledger) meets Jack (Gyllenhaal) when they get jobs herding sheep in the summer of '63. They become friends via mutual hardship, and one fateful night when they're both very drunk, they have sex (side note: I was surprised at this scene, it happened a lot more suddenly then I expected and on top of that it was almost violent in its intensity). Afterwards they decide it's a one-time thing, but it's not - four years later, when they're both married (to other people) with kids, Jack gets back in touch with Ennis. They start going on regular "fishing trips", stealing away to Brokeback for a week or so at a time.
Not surprisingly, both of their marriages deteriorate. Ennis neglects his kids, leaving them at work with his wife, and shows more enthusiasm for letters recieved from Jack than for her. Not that she doesn't know what's going on, she sees the kiss they assault each other with the first time they meet after four years, and plants notes in his fishing box that never get seen or removed. Not surprisingly, that ends in divorce after two children.
Jack is arguably a better husband, but not by much. He meetss Anne Hathaway (I forget the character's name) at a rodeo, she's a barrel-racer (she races horses in a sort of loop pattern around barrels), he's a bull rider (he has to sit on an enraged bull for 8 seconds without getting tossed), and by the end of the night, she's had sex with him in the back of a car. They get married, have a child, and Jack takes a job working for her dad's business. There's also a minor subplot dealing with her father's general dislike for him, although after Jack tells him off we don't see much of that. Their marriage slowly degenerates into what is essentially a business partnership, whether or not his wife knows he's sleeping with Ennis is irrelevant - either way she doesn't seem to care. I should also point out that I really liked the way they progressed Anne Hathaway's appearance in this - the first time you see her she's in rodeo gear with horseshoe earrings and a cowboy hat and she looks really (surprisingly) cute, by the end of the movie she's got large, bleached hair, too much makeup, and her fashion sense seems like she forgot what "class" means. They stay together for the kid, or the business, or because there's really no reason for them to get divorced, but to really call it a marriage would be a lie.
Meanwhile, the guys' affair hasn't been easy for either of them. It's clearly when they're happiest, but they find it harder and harder to get away from the duties of their home lives. Jack wants to steal away, buy a ranch somewhere and herd sheep or whatever, Ennis won't even allow himself that fantasy - when he was young his father showed him the body of a gay man who'd been brutally murdered, and Ennis even says it wouldn't surprise him if the old man did it himself. They spend less time together, miss each other more, and Jack even starts sleeping with other men (including the husband of one of his wife's friends and a Mexican male prostitute). Ennis, meanwhile, half-heartedly attempts a relationship with a local waitress - that ends with him leaving, no explanation whatsoever.
One day Ennis gets a letter addressed to him telling him to call Jack's number (i think that's how it happened) and when he does, Jack's wife picks up. She calmly informs Ennis that Jack is dead and explains in great detail what happened. Apparently (according to her) his car busted a flat, so he pulled over to the side of the road to change the tire. The spare exploded, hurling the tire iron into his face, killing him instantly. Onscreen, we see a different version - Jack, running by the side of the road, chased down by a group of men who beat his face in with a tire iron and leave him for dead. The beauty of this scene is that it is never explained what really happened - was he beaten to death, or is that just in Ennis' head?
Ennis goes to visit Jack's parents, hoping to get his ashes so they could be spread on Brokeback Mountain. It never happens, but he is given one of Jack's shirts, which he hangs in his closet, next to a picture of Brokeback. The finally scene of the movie shows his oldest daughter, now 19, pulling up to his trailer, telling him she's getting married.
As a whole, the movie was good, but I don't think it was the masterwork of brilliance that everyone's making it out to be. There's a certain parellel to Crouching Tiger (another Ang Lee movie, which I still liked better), the central love story about two people who can't be together. What really kept me from completely being absorbed into the film was the way the main characters treated their wives - Jack and Ennis's lives aren't the only ones damaged or destroyed by the end, and they are certainly not innocent of hurting other people (and very badly, I might add). Granted, this isn't completely necessary for a good movie (Flawed characters are the best ones, after all), but I personally found it hard to feel as sympathetic for Ennis when he was blatantly blowing off his wife and two daughters.
The other thing that kept me from really thinking of this movie as being the quintessence of perfection that everyone said it was would be the actual portrayal of the Jake and Ennis' love - I didn't really get a sense that being together was spiritual bliss for them. Fun, sure, but in Crouching Tiger we saw both couples finding genuine peace in their moments together, and I never really got that sense in Brokeback. They seemed infatuated, obsessed, passionate, and addicted to each other, but not deeply in love. Their trysts on Brokeback reminded me more of junkies going for their fix than lovers finding rare moments of happiness in an otherwise unhappy life.
Beyond that, though, it was pretty good. I wouldn't go about promoting it as best picture-worthy, but it's definitely a good movie.