Reduced to caricature prior to its release, and now a new form of derisive shorthand for bigots everywhere, Brokeback Mountain
remains a powerful and acutely affecting film, and not nearly for the
reasons many out to wage their own political crusade ascribe to it.
Yes, it is a love story centering around two homosexual cowboys. But
its observational prowess is nearly unrivaled in all of American film
of the past several years not directed by Alexander Payne. Brokeback Mountain
is also a keen rendering of the corrosive nature of self-denial. Dreams
of all types are buried and traded in every day across the world, but Brokeback Mountain
shows — in moving, modest and melancholic fashion — just what it means
to deny something that is a part of you to your very core.

Opening
in Wyoming, the story throws together two itinerant ranch hands, Ennis
Del Mar (H eath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), who find work
under Joe Aguirre (Randy Quaid) herding sheep in the summer of 1963.
Both rugged individualists, the pair forge an unexpected bond and
tumble into a lusty physical clinch, but part ways at the end of the
job. Engaged to Alma (Michelle Williams), Ennis gets married; Jack also
weds, tying the knot and having kids with outgoing, well-to-do rodeo
queen Lureen (Anne Hathaway). A couple years later they reconnect,
though, and enter into a protracted, if limited, affair consisting of
stolen fishing trips and camping vacations.

Director Ang Lee, working from an adaptation of Annie Proulx’s short
story of the same name and using Gustavo Santaolalla’s haunting score
as an aural highlighter, locates the unseen social forces and the
limits of personal nerve that inform his characters’ behavior. The
fierce insight and clench-jawed genius of Ledger’s performance in
particular lies in the manner in which he never allows himself to even
entertain the possibility of honest happiness.

Presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen that preserves the aspect ratio of the film’s original theatrical exhibition, Brokeback Mountain
comes housed in an Amray case, and features English and French language
Dolby digital 5.1 audio tracks alongside optional English, French and
Spanish subtitles. Four single-digit-minute featurettes comprise the
disc’s bonus materials, looking in cursory fashion at the film’s
character development, the modus operandi of director Lee, the
particulars of Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana’s adaptation and the
production itself. Of this quartet, the “script to screen” featurette
is probably the most interesting, but everything about this release
clearly augurs a more comprehensive, double-disc special edition DVD
somewhere down the line. To that end, hedge your collecting plans
accordingly. A (Movie) C- (Disc)

Based on the true story of a wealthy English widower who operated a
nude revue on the West End during World War II, director Stephen
Frears’ awkwardly titled Mrs. Henderson Presents is a cheeky look at the special
type of wartime fortification that no amount of guns and sandbags can
provide. A sort of hodge-podge mixture of Topsy-Turvy, The Full Monty and that old episode of The Golden Girls
where ostentatious, entitled Blanche finally meets her male
counterpart, the film works chiefly as a sharp, smartly funny
two-hander — a delicious showcase for stars Judi Dench and Bob Hoskins
— before taking a final act turn that overreaches just a bit in its
grasp at grand statement. For the full review, from IGN, click here.

Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain is making a convincing claim for “Year of” honors in
impending 2005 wrap pieces and awards season races everywhere. Gyllenhaal is
Swofford, a naïve sharpshooter who comes to the Marines from a dead-end
background. There he meets up with the taciturn Alan Troy (Peter Sarsgaard) and
many others, and they train under Staff Sergeant Sykes (Jamie Foxx) before being
summoned to the desert staging ground in a five-month-plus ramp-up to conflict.

A big part of Jarhead is about the tedium of war, as chronicled
through that wait. It’s here that the movie’s keen and glancingly heartrending
sense of detail (a “Wall of Shame” for Polaroids of cheating girlfriends and
wives back home; coerced drug liability waivers signed just prior to going into
battle) gets its hooks into you. Once the bullets start flying, however,
Jarhead ironically becomes a bit more unfocused. This was, after all, a
war won quickly through the air, and while the movie depicts honestly and
forthrightly the conflicted feelings the Marines have about this (bloodthirsty,
combat-hungry but on-edge), there’s not a clear sense of the lines of the front
for the skirmishes that do take place to feel rooted and substantial.

That’s part of the point, I realize. War is a big word — perhaps the heaviest
three-letter word in the English language — but Jarhead gets the micro
right while the macro feels out of focus a bit. The film isn’t a minor work, but
neither does it achieve masterpiece status; its meter is actually more like that
of a stageplay than a film, due in large part to the anecdotal nature of the
source material. That may be a turnoff for some folks, and certainly account for
divided/conflicted opinion, both critically at large and even within one’s own
reflections on the movie.

Jarhead reminded me in significant ways of the recent Iraq war
documentary Gunner Palace, because it assays the very personal cost of
broad, international conflicts. Mendes’ film isn’t incendiary, or even
particularly an antiwar salvo. It’s not an indictment of one political
philosophy, but rather a rebuke of the system and a psalm for the pawns of the
chessboard. One particularly effective scene finds the soldiers — pushed into a
full-gear demonstration football match — haranguing an irritated Sykes in front
of a camera crew about all the pieces of equipment that either they don’t have
(and haven’t for months) or don’t properly work.

On an end note, slightly amusing is the fashion in which the film is being
doggedly sold as a hoo-rah!, pro-military, bootstraps actioner, with
Foxx’s proud speechifying capping off bits of strung-together action mayhem. The
irony is that within the film that speech, while sincere, comes at a down
moment, when two men are sharing a frank conversation wherein the undiscussed
white elephant is the essential futility of their grunt existence but devotion
to it nonetheless. Americans who’ve never served have a complicated,
contradictory and often almost embarrassed relationship with our Armed Forces.
Jarhead grippingly flirts with peeling back the layers of truth on these
subjugated capital-I issues, but as its brawny marketing shows us, that
awkwardness will not likely change anytime soon. DVD extras include two audio commentary tracks (one with Mendes, another with Swofford and screenwriter William Broyles, Jr.), deleted scenes with an introduction by Mendes and editor Walter Murch, news interviews and more. B (Movie) B+ (Disc)

Jean Renoir’s brooding, palpably anxious 1938 melodrama La Bête Humaine
is a bit of a curveball in the legendary French filmmaker’s canon, but
no less a work of considerable intrigue and import. Adapted from Émile
Zola’s novel, the film, starring Jean Gabin (Pépé le Moko, Touchez Pas Au Grisbi),
is perhaps Renoir’s most roundly populist offering, and remains to this
day a hardboiled and suspenseful journey into the wounded psyche of an
everyday working man.

Part pulpy noir antecedent and part
exercise in grimy realism, the film’s story centers on Lantier (Gabin),
an unbalanced train engineer who, moved to groggy lust, plots with the
married Severine (Simone Simon) to bump off her older husband, Roubaud
(Fernand Ledoux). It gives away nothing to say that Severine’s
motivations are suspect, and so naturally lethal manipulations follow
all manner of mutual sexual exploitation. The commercial success of the
picture — Renoir’s biggest hit — lies somewhat in the sudsy nature of
its material, but also in the filmmaker’s infallible eye for authentic
detail. The story works so well because we feel the well-worn, dog-eared soul of Lantier, his pawned dreams and swallowed class resentment.

Criterion’s superb release features a new, high-definition digital
transfer of the original, uncensored full-screen version of the movie,
which really makes a difference in Curt Courant’s stunning
cinematography, particularly with shadow and in the recesses of the
frame. There are still apparently a few missing or irrevocably damaged
frames here and there, resulting in some occasional hitches, but
otherwise the film looks better than it has any right to, with very
minimal scratching. In a six-minute introduction to the film from some
considerable time after production, Renoir reveals that he hammered out
his adaptation in only a dozen days, and there’s also a new, 11-minute
interview with filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich in which he waxes
philosophic and contextual about both Renoir and La Bête Humaine’s place in his filmography.

Also included is seven minutes of footage from 1957 of Renoir
directing actress Simon in a bit of a fanciful live recreation from the
movie, plus 24 minutes of interviews from a French television program,
with Renoir, Zola scholar Henri Mitterand and others, on the unique
challenges of adapting Zola’s work to the screen. Rounding out the
supplemental material is the film’s theatrical trailer and a gallery of
on-set photographs and theatrical posters that complement a 38-page
insert booklet featuring musings and memories from critic Geoffrey
O’Brien, film historian Ginette Vincendeau and production designer
Eugene Lourié. B+ (Movie) A- (Disc)

Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s animated series South Park
got its start as a defiantly crude slice of counterculture, with the
shock value of potty-mouthed adolescents and the bashing of various
sacred cows. As it’s aged, though, it’s only gotten smarter and better,
surpassing The Simpsons as the best animated comedy on television several years ago, and holding onto that title with ease.