Well, I Saw The Movie.

It was as good as I’d heard and expected. Heath Ledger should be at the top of the Oscar list, and Michelle Williams deserves Best Supporting Actress, for sure. Jake Gyllenhaal is also excellent, but unlike Ledger, he isn’t called on to carry a physical manifestation of guilt and self-doubt with him through almost the entire film, an amazing labor.

Which brings me to the important part the physicality of the story plays in this film. We see in this movie, in a way that film was invented to capture, how much these two men are indeed physical creatures, at the mercy of their body’s limits in the harsh environment of the mountain, and at the mercy of the way their physical desires betray them once the mountain cracks them open to each other. It’s what makes the performances so compelling to watch. You see Ledger’s Ennis trying to cut the desires out of his flesh by punishing his body; he throws himself manically into backbreaking physical labor, even when other, less taxing opportunities arise, in an attempt to crush what lies within him. When he’s not sweating, he’s medicating his wounds in a bath of whisky and beer. Jack seeks to tame himself by mastering the bulls he rides in the rodeo ring, a battle that he finally gives up, in the same way he accepts more easily than Ennis the limits of his will and the crooked nature of his timber. So much of the physical contact we see between Jack and Ennis is almost fighting; these men, who come from a culture where bodily work is valued above all and a man is proven by what he can stand, both feel deeply undermined by their inability to break their physical attachment. They get literally sick with need for each other. Whatever argument has ever been made about natural or unnatural attraction is made mute by the way these two strong men are made weak in the face of their own natures.

The portrayal of the Western landscape was another intrusion of this natural world into the film, and Ang Lee has beautifully captured the Kodachrome existence of bleak poverty and exquisite beauty that was the West not too long ago. Many of the scenes looked like the snapshots of my Seventies boyhood, shot at my grandparents trailer up on the Kamas River in Northeastern Utah. The art direction of the film is detail perfect (if you’re a car nut like me, you can tell the bones of this story through the succession of period trucks in different states of repair that the two characters drive) , and the cinematography is shaded with a look of slightly dated film, a fuzzy edge that captures beautifully the thin air of the high altitudes.

Certainly I recognized a bit of myself in the characters, an alternate universe version of myself, of my more bitter and self-destructive elements. I wonder how I would have reacted, as a deeply closeted nineteen year old, if I had fallen in love like these two do. At nineteen, I was a Mormon missionary shipped off to the French West Indies, and I can only imagine the hell I would have found myself in if I had, say, fallen into love with one of my missionary companions. I can’t imagine what my reaction would have driven me to. It was hard enough working it all out on my own, without having to carry a love like Jack and Ennis’s through the crucible, the same crucible that left those two so deeply damaged. In one of the great climatic moments of the film, Jack and Ennis erupt into a wounding dispute, as Ennis realizes what his love of Jack, and his refusal to acknowledge that love, has cost him. It was bad enough letting down my family, community, and religion by accepting who I was. I can’t imagine the pain of letting down my one true love.

After the film I drove up to my old rugby practice grounds in the hillsides of Elysian Park. It was one of those winter days in Los Angeles, the bright, dry, smog-less days that remind you that you do, indeed, live in the West, when you can see the gray San Gabriel Mountains that ring the city, and you feel briefly a connection to the land that exists down under all that concrete. As I watched those slopes grow pink in the late afternoon light, the vaulted bridges over the Los Angeles River arrayed like natural arches marching to the South, I thought of how my ancestors must have found themselves when they crossed the plains out of civilization and into this foreign landscape. “I am a stranger in a strange land” Moses said as he fled into the deserts of Sinai. It’s a sentiment, no matter how long I live here, no matter how elaborate a life I build, that I cannot ever, finally shake.