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My own private Wyoming
I wouldn't call director Ang Lee's gay-themed breakthrough a "metrosexual" Western, but I reckon it would at least cause John Wayne, spurs and all, to roll over in his grave. Then again, what was all that funny business about in Red River when cowpokes Montgomery Clift and John Ireland compared their six-shooters? And wasn't Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid really a roundabout romance between two men? Homoerotic potshots aside, Lee has moved a mountain, or at least nudged it out of the closet. He and co-screenwriters Diana Ossana and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove) have taken Annie Proulx's preciously short story and branded it with compassion and humanity. But it's the low-key acting of Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal that takes Brokeback Mountain to the heights. In 1963, Ledger's Ennis Del Mar and Gyllenhaal's Jack Twist meet as strapping young cowboys on the Wyoming range. With Brokeback Mountain as their camp, they're hired for the summer by a leathery rancher (Randy Quaid) to tend a flock of sheep. But it's horseplay, not sheep, which bring these two together. Lee tends to the pair's relationship with a risky and raw directness. Ennis and Jack are masculine guys whose desire for the other arises out of need as well as genuine affection. "I'm not queer or nothing," Ennis insists to Jack, even though their affair will eventually span two decades. As Lee's direction of Sense and Sensibility seized on the flowery eloquence and ironies of the English language, here he brings out the Western reticence of his two characters. Ennis is painfully laconic in the Gary Cooper mold. Neither can express their feelings for the other. Their physical acts of love and play say all they want to say. What elevates this movie above other gay dramas is Lee's feel for the West—primarily its desolation—and the emotional nuance he draws out of Ledger and Gyllenhaal. Slow and languid, his pace takes getting used to (this despite Proulx's story was a mere 11 pages long). Sometimes the action is so pokey that you can't help but focus on the trivialities, like the evolving length of the guys' sideburns. In this audacious love story, nothing else seems to matter to Lee or his writers. Jack and Ennis age through the 1960s and 1970s, marry and live parallel lives in Wyoming and Texas, yet nothing of that era's tumult is seen. It's as if their secret love is so perfect that the world shrinks behind them. Their respective wives are either cold and bitchy (Anne Hathaway) or warm and needy (Michelle Williams). Next to the forbidden love born on a pristine Wyoming mountain, everything else is a molehill. The transcendence of this story lies exactly in the impossible love of Lee's star-crossed couple. For this gender- and genre-bending Romeo and Juliet in the West, it's social intolerance—and Ennis' timidity—that keeps them apart. For Jack and Ennis, home on the range is only a dream. Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
Putting on the kitsch You have to hand it to Mel Brooks and his fellow producers of The Producers. As splashed on screen, the smash musical may be the biggest, brashest Broadway joke of all time. At the time of Brooks' original 1968 movie, the comic intent was to spoof the "worst play ever." But who will spoof The Producers, one of the tackiest and overproduced musicals of our time? First bowing as a low-budget film, Brooks' zany, eyebrow-raising comedy starred Broadway legend Zero Mostel and delightful newcomer Gene Wilder. In 2001, Nathan Lane and Mathew Broderick rejuvenated the roles as Broadway hucksters in a goose-stepping extravaganza that went on to win 11 Tony Awards. Hedging her bets with Hollywood muscle, director Susan Stroman has beefed up the cast with Uma Thurman and Will Ferrell. As failed 1950s impresario Max Bialystock, Lane is the one irreplaceable joker in Stroman's loud and loaded deck. Reluctantly assisted by mousey accountant Leo Bloom (Broderick), Max hits on the idea of making a fortune out of a flop. First they have to find the worst play ever written, and then it's on to scam an army of libidinous old ladies as their investors. Max makes his open-and-shut case for Springtime for Hitler, a sort of Funny Girl featuring the Führer. "I'm not going into the toilet, I'm going into show business!" declares Max in high-spirited defiance. With his roly-poly features, puckish verve and cartoon voice, Lane is a live-wire throwback to the golden days of vaudeville. Dividing his performance between wide-eyed mugging and Gene Wilder's memorable mania, Broderick hangs on for dear life by Lane's coattails. Stroman goes one for two in her marquee pinch-hitting. In a small but overpowering role, Thurman explodes as Ulla, the blond Swedish bombshell whom Max hires as his "secretary-slash-receptionist." Staggeringly pneumatic, Thurman leaves Max and Leo limp and speechless in her show-stopping "When You Got It, Flaunt It" number. As the loony neo-Nazi playwright, Ferrell is so ferociously and spittingly over the top, I hope the other cast members all got rabies shots. Ferrell's Teutonic turn helps lower the curtain on this movie as a legitimate musical, while raising it as an über-campy cartoon. Stroman plays every scene to the hilt, oblivious to the world of differences between stage and film. Miraculously, from the flaming gay characters to the 1950s Monroe-esque sexpot, almost nothing in this garish production reminds us that we're in the 21st century. At best, I suppose you could call The Producers a time capsule. Then again, Brooks' Broadway blockbuster may prove that blustery bad taste is timeless. Thomas Delapa reviews the latest movies on KUVO (FM 89.3) Fridays at 8:40 a.m. Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
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Red River was never like this. Nor were The Searchers,
Stagecoach or even The Wild Bunch. If you've ever wondered what lonesome
cowboys do on those long nights out on the prairie, mosey up Brokeback Mountain
and see for yourself, pardner.
