Manohla Dargis on Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhall in Brokeback Mountain

[lsanderson]

If Heath Ledger has attracted so much attention for his performance in "Brokeback Mountain" it's partly because he has finally made good on his early overhyped promise and partly because his character in Ang Lee's romantic tragedy, Ennis Del Mar, represents a kind of impacted masculinity that a lot of us recognize: I don't know a single straight woman who hasn't been involved with a man as emotionally thwarted as Ennis, the man who can't tell you how he feels because he may not honestly know. And because the film is, in many respects, about how difficult it is to live in a culture that punishes men who give the appearance of being too soft, too weak and too feminine, I imagine that a lot of men, gay and straight, recognize Ennis, too.

Unlike Ennis, Jake Gyllenhaal's doe-eyed Jack Twist wears desire as openly as pain. Without his sensitive performance, without his ache and yearning, "Brokeback Mountain" wouldn't work half as well as it does. The beauty of the performance is fully evident in the scene in which the older Jack remembers when Ennis gently wrapped his arms around him during the men's first summer together. It's a devastating moment both because it juxtaposes the men's idyllic past with their difficult present, and because it reminds us of how memories live inside us as promises, rebukes and ghosts. When the scene returns to the present, you see in this man's face a lifetime of hope blur together with a lifetime of disappointment, as well as the beginning of the lovers' end.