Brokeback Mountain (2005) - 7/10
I appreciated that it wasn't a fairy tale. It had a lot of warts. The film isn't afraid to show the relationship as selfish. Whether it be the quality of the work that suffers while they frolic gayly in the fields or it causes pain to their loved ones or themselves. It's the wanting that takes precedence over everything else.
Ultimately I think this is a film about love and how it can ruin you if you let it. None of these characters have free will. They're all slaves to love. The wife of Heath Leger's character goes on loving him. It forces her to leave him and years later confront him at Thanksgiving. Leger's 2nd girlfriend similarly sees him in a diner after he's presumably ghosted her and she's still reeling. None has agency in the wake of their love.
Conversely, Ann Hathaway's character is loveless. She's easily able to let Gyllenhaal's character go to Wyoming multiple times a year. It is of no consequence to her. Their relationship is a formality.
Having the premise be about 2 men in a hyper-masculine world allows us to explore that uniquely but I think this is very universal in a broader sense because it being about 2 men isn't exactly the point.
The film doesn't stop to moralize. It's a close-up of this relationship and it stays zoomed in on the micro and leaves the macro implications to you.
Then there's the question of Gyllenhaal's death. When Hathaway tells Ledger of his death she tells him, robotically, of how it happened. We are shown violent images of Gyllenhaal being beaten to death.
Is this Ledger's fears we see or is it the truth? We can't know of course because that *would* be moralizing. We have to ask ourselves.
As an aside, I did like the touch of Ledger finding his missing shirt, along with Gyllenhaal's, hidden in the closet. It's a bit on the nose, homos hiding the closet, but I dunno. Maybe too obvious of a metaphor to be called subtext.