Brokeback Mountain.

"Is Brokeback Mountain, as it's been touted, Hollywood's first gay love story?" asks novelist David Leavitt in Slate. "The answer - in a very positive sense, I think - is yes to the love story, no to the gay." David Ehrenstein is having none of it, ripping into both Leavitt's essay and the film: "It has fallen to us (not by choice) to reinvent the world. And we have. Why not continue to do so then? Why look to straight hand-me-downs for guidance?"

Well. Meanwhile, back at Slate, David Edelstein (don't confuse 'em, not that you would), who segues into takes on Breakfast on Pluto, Transamerica and Rent.

Stephen Holden: "This moving and majestic film would be a landmark if only because it is the first Hollywood movie to unmask the homoerotic strain in American culture that Leslie Fiedler discerned in his notorious 1948 Partisan Review essay, 'Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey.'" What's more, Heath Ledger's is "a great screen performance, as good as the best of Marlon Brando and Sean Penn."

Kenneth Turan: "Taking time, not being in a hurry, lends credibility to a destination everyone but the protagonists know is coming." Also in the Los Angeles Times: Steven Barrie-Anthony meets Annie Proulx:

"Put yourself in my place," the author says. "An elderly, white, straight female, trying to write about two 19-year-old gay kids in 1963. What kind of imaginative leap do you think was necessary? Profound, extreme, large. To get into those guys' heads and actions took a lot of 16-hour days, and never thinking about anything else and living a zombie life. That's what I had to do. I really needed an exorcist to get rid of those characters. And they roared back when I saw the film."

Stephanie Zacharek in Salon: "Brokeback Mountain takes great pains to be a compassionate love story; but the filmmaking itself, self-consciously restrained and desiccated, is inert and inexpressive... it's a closeted movie."

The Reeler has far more than the usual blog entry, nabbing quotes from Ang Lee, screenwriter Diana Ossana and producer James Schamus, and emphasizing: "Ang Lee has not made a movie about men and men, or men and women - he has made a movie about souls."

Karina Longworth at Cinematical: "It's not particularly politically provocative, and it's flawed for sure, but in its subtle elevation of a single romance to the stuff of literal life and death, Brokeback Mountain makes every bleeding heart film (from the justly-commended Good, to the Constantly over-praised bad) in a year chock full of them look comparatively burlesque."

Steve Erickson: "I fear that it's turning into this year's equivalent to Sideways: a very good film that's so over-praised one practically has to apologize for liking it or look like a shill."

For Jim Tudor, writing at Twitch, this "may be [Lee's] career masterpiece."

Anhoni Patel for KQED's Scene and Unseen: "This movie just about broke my heart."

Posted by dwhudson at December 9, 2005 12:42 PM