By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
B. Ruby polishes Brokeback Mountain: Cinema history thereafter has to arrange itself around it
“Every once in a while a film comes along that changes our perceptions so much that cinema history thereafter has to arrange itself around it,” B. Ruby Rich asserts in the Guardian: “Think of Thelma and Louise or Chungking Express, Blow-Up or Orlando—all big films that taught us to look and think and swagger differently. Brokeback Mountain is just such a film. Even for audiences educated by a decade of the New Queer Cinema phenomenon… it’s a shift in scope and tenor so profound as to signal a new era… Quite simply, despite the long careers of Derek Jarman, Gus Van Sant, John Waters, Gregg Araki, Todd Haynes, Patricia Rozema, or Ulrike Ottinger, there has never been a film by a brand-name director, packed with A-list Hollywood stars at the peak of their careers, that has taken an established conventional genre by the horns and wrestled it into a tale of homosexual love emotionally positioned to ensnare a general audience. With Brokeback Mountain, all bets are off… With utter audacity, renowned director Ang Lee, aided and abetted by legendary novelist-screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana and master storyteller Annie Proulx, have taken on the most sacred of all American genres, the western, and queered it… It’s a great love story, pure and simple. And simultaneously the story of a great love that’s broken and warped in the torture chamber of a society’s intolerance and threats, an individual’s fear and repression. In the end, Brokeback Mountain is a grand romantic tragedy, joining the ranks of great literature as much as great cinema.” [Extensive choruses at the link.]
