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Brokeback Mountain... I don't know what to say about it. I really don't. I've watched it so many times, and every time it burrows its way inside me and makes me feel things I didn't realise I could feel. Truly.
I remember reading the short story on which this is based, many years ago, long before the film was released. I'd been following the development of the film for a while as well, hearing different names attached to it, noting the length of time between when it wrapped principal photography and finally appeared at Venice. I just kept waiting and waiting, having heard that the script had been touted for years in Hollywood as the best script that would never get made (got that wrong, didn't they!)
What struck me when I first saw the film in late 2005 after almost bursting into tears when trying to get a taxi in 45 degree celcius Sydney heat to a media screening of the film saw me arrive just in the nick of time, was that the film plays so remarkably close to the original short story by Annie Proulx. Quite remarkably. The story is, after all, short - my memory is telling me it runs somewhere in the vicinity of forty pages. The film is somewhat longer - a little over two hours. Definitely not even a short feature film. But screenwriters Diana Ossana and Larry McMurtry, and director Ang Lee, hone and hone the film, allowing every second to count while stretching them out to the lifetime of the characters, giving Jack (Jake Gyllenhall) and Ennis (Heath Ledger) so much room to breathe at and to each other, and away from each other, to their wives Lureen (Anne Hathaway) and Alma (Michelle Williams), their children, their families. The land itself becomes a character, imposing beauty with the sharp edge of hostility everywhere they went.
But it's all about their love, and the trauma that brings to the two. It is quite obviously a gay love story - they are two men - but it is really just like any story of illicit love. What they do could get them killed, in much the same way as Romeo and Juliet operated. They hide their love and try and go on as normal, and the most overtly political statement of the film is a look at the destruction to the traditional family unit that those lies cause.
But Brokeback Mountain doesn't set out to be political. It is a love story between two cowboys in a time when a love story between two guys wasn't even a possibility out in Wyoming. And that love story is heartbreakingly beautiful. A huge credit has to go to Ossana and McMurtry for the stunning screenplay, with definite credit to Proulx as much of the dialogue did originate in her short story, and the lines spoken are oft apt to reach into your chest and stop your heart. The actors took a bow of some description with Oscar noms for Ledger, Gyllenhall and Williams, though supports from Randy Quaid, Linda Cardellini and Anna Faris, as well as Hathaway in her breakaway from her previous children-orientated roles, are notable. Lee's touch directing the picture saw him walk away with the golden man, and it truly is one of the most gently and simply directed films I have seen, but with power running through every scene. Gustavo Santaolalla created the instantly recognisable original score, which I often find myself quietly listening to in moments of reflection, and Rodrigo Prieto captures the images with serene beauty, as well as pulling off a memorable momentary cameo as a Mexican prostitute.
This feels like it rambles all over the place, formless, but that's how the film makes me feel. And there are so many quotes, phrases and words from the film that could be been referenced here in place of structure, but that would only serve to cheapen the power of them when spoken in the picture. Just let it be said that the final scene, the final unfinished sentence inside Ennis' trailer, is just about the only scene that, whether I'm reading the short story or watching the film, will floor me every time. Never a dry eye, and that is unlike any other film I've seen. 5 stars.
Eleven year old crazed female killers? It happened long before Kick-Ass, my friends.
Luc Besson apparently wrote the script for Léon (or The Professional) in thirty days after production was pushed back on The Fifth Element due to Bruce Willis' schedule. He didn't want to have to let the production crew go or lose his momentum, so he made another film while he waited. Of course. As you do. As much as I have fond memories of The Fifth Element from when I was a child, this film is definitely the better of the two. Sometimes the best moments in life occur while you're waiting for something to happen, or however that goes.
Léon (Jean Reno) is a contract killer, a 'cleaner.' He lives next door to a family, whose middle child Mathilda (Natalie Portman) manages to miss her family being killed by crooked cop Stansfield (Gary Oldman) as she has ducked out to the shops. She begs Léon to take her in and teach her to 'clean' so that she can exact revenge on the people who killed her little brother, which he is very resistant to - he works alone. She wins him over through pleading and her Lolita-esque beguiling charm - it's been a long time since I last saw the film, but the first thing that came into my head was of Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver.
What follows is Léon training to Mathilda to 'clean.' They work out every day, he teaches her how to handle weapons and use them, and eventually she embarks on her expedition to exact vengeance on Stansfield and his crew. However, she underestimates precisely how brilliantly mad Stansfield is, resulting in a fantastically epic final fight.
Superficially the film could bear similarity to films such as The Karate Kid - old master takes on young apprentice, teaching all he knows before apprentice becomes brilliant. What sets it apart is the darkness and precociousness of Mathilda. Portman lays down the gauntlet to the rest of her career (which she has done a damn good job of successfully challenging) with a tremendous debut performance at eleven years of age, holding her own against the simple matter-of-factness of Reno's Léon and the highly crazed maniacism of Oldman (which made me think of his Dark Knight costar, Heath Ledger's Joker.)
A very good film, it didn't quite make it to great status for me. Just lacking something, that little bit of va-va-voom that sticks in your mind and refuses to leave. 4 stars.
I have a copy of this film back home in Australia, but I never watched it completely. It took me a long time to get around to watching it in the first place, and then my DVD screwed up about two thirds of the way through and I gave up, figuring I'd give it another shot a few days later, and then never putting it back on. I hadn't overly enjoyed the opening of Candy, you see, and I think I was unfavourably comparing it to Little Fish, which had come out the year and was a better film.
The Candy of the title is played by Abbie Cornish, a couple of years after her mammoth breakout with Somersault. She has met Dan, a heroin addict, a loser, played be Heath Ledger, and dives into the scene, starting off snorting and ending up arguing over needles. Deeply in love with each other they keep falling deeper and deeper into drugs, unable to keep themselves together, unable to pay rent, unable to come up with any money, stealing, begging off family, prostituting themselves, anything they can to get one more hit. Candy gets pregnant and they decide the have to stop, preparing themselves and locking themselves in their room, telling their friends not to answer their calls, falling to pieces in scenes reminiscent of what Ewan McGregor goes through in Trainspotting a decade earlier. When Candy miscarries the two fall apart even more, deciding on a move to the country and a stint on methadone to try and get themselves clean.
It all starts off ok, they're distraught but they're together and trying to rebuild something new and clean together, but Candy quickly starts a fling with a neighbour, before descending into madness, writing their life story in paints and crayons all over the walls of the house before finding herself in an institution. After rehab she tracks Dan down, but Dan doesn't want to drag her back into his world and knows their relationship was only ever functional with drugs, so lets her go.
This, I've decided, is my favourite Cornish role. She starts it with the same problems as I have with her in most other films, but her breakdown towards the end, her screaming match with her mother in the country after a ruined lunch, showed me depth I haven't really seen in her. I was more impressed than I expected to be. Ledger was solid if not exemplary, and I think he just went from strength to strength over the last couple of years of his life, becoming something truly sensational. Geoffrey Rush, as their gay confidant, camps it up but that kind of works here, and Noni Hazlehurst as Candy's mother is extraordinary. (Sidenote: I grew up watching her on Playschool and for years didn't realise she was an accomplished actress earlier in her career, so when I saw her first in Little Fish and then here, both times playing the swearing, hysterical mother of a drug addict, I found it amazingly confronting. She is truly incredible as an actress.) Tony Wilson as her father gives a nice, calm antidote to the wound up mother, and Tom Budge as Candy and Dan's friend is, as always, a revelation. He keeps going from strength to strength, with roles in films like Ten Empty and Last Train To Freo really cementing himself as a talent to keep your eye out for. Plus he can bring the same intensity to the stage - brilliant.
Candy isn't the debut feature from director Neil Armfield, but it was 16 years after his previous effort, so I'm kind of counting it. He's a huge stage director in Australia, creative director of the well-respected Belvoir Street Theatre in Sydney, and his love of theatrics shows in the film. While the book on which the film is based, by Luke Davies, is very dark, very real, the film isn't. The fairytale love aspect comes through in heightened reality, but the trauma it leads to never hits home. Dan never looked like a drug addict, Candy never felt skanky enough, it all just remained a little airbrushed, a little safe, a drug story for the upper-middle class dreaming of the romance of the gutter. It's not bad, but it's not great, though I did find myself a little more affected at the end than I thought. It passed, though, and it passed quickly. So 3 stars it shall be.
