You've Got to Hide Your Love Away

I saw Brokeback Mountain a month or so ago, and though I genuinely appreciated the fact that it broke new ground, I was hardly as enraptured as the critics. To be sure, it was beautifully shot, well acted and faithful to the brilliant Annie Proulx story on which it was based. But the reviews rang false in a very politically correct kind of way. I thought of Brokeback Mountain as the "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" for the civil rights issue of our time-- an attempt to bring gay love into the mainstream and make it palatable for middle-class audiences.

Therefore, Daniel Mendelsohn's appraisal in the New York Review of Books was a revelation. In it, he writes that Brokeback Mountain is not a "universal love story," as critics would have it. Rather, it is specifically about the tragedy of being closeted: the self-loathing and shame that result from and in the denial of erotic attachment. It shows, as he writes, how the tragedy of the closet can lay waste to whole families. Heath Ledger's portrayal of Ennis Del Mar-- mumbling, shuffling, stooped, inarticulate-- thorougly reveals his inability to be fully human. His last line in the movie--"Jack, I swear...."-- remains incomplete, just like his life. The cinematography, meanwhile, is full of motifs on the theme of confinement, Mendelsohn writes. The lovers are truly happy only in the brief time they're in the open, playing in expansive fields under a wide blue sky. The rest of the movie shows them in small places-- stuck in a tiny house, a too-small chair, framed against a tiny window or reflected in a small mirror. It is telling that the movie's climaxes occur in two closets.

Thanks, Mr. Mendelsohn, for a truly enlightening piece of criticsm.