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Why you should see
Brokeback MountainThe tragic love story between two ranchers, Heath Ledger's brooding, intense Ennis Del Mar and Jake Gyllenhaal's extrovert Jack Twist, Brokeback Mountain acquired the pathos of real-life tragedy with the untimely death of Heath Ledger. The cultural impact of Brokeback was immense, but like Rebel Without A Cause and Stand By Me, will it be enshrined as iconic due to Ledger's death, the source of a doomed young actor's posthumous myth? Brokeback's Oscars for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay are almost incidental. Director Ang Lee's soulful evocation of the Wyoming landscape sets Ennis and Jack's passion against the freedom of the wild, then draws us into the tight spaces of their domestic half-lives, both men conforming and marrying, their passion for one another permitted only in their yearned-for yearly fishing trips. The message is universal; how fate and circumstance conspire against freedom, how it is possible to spend your four-score and ten in the wrong life.
Matthew De Abaitua
