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The story of Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar is a rather conventional romance. Two people thrust together by circumstances fall in love but are then torn apart by circumstances. They get together every once in a while but struggle to overcome the obstacles that stand in their way. We've seen this narrative many times in the movies, but we've never seen it quite like this. That's because Jack and Ennis are both men, which is why _Brokeback Mountain_ might be one of the most talked about movies of this holiday season.

The film's first 45 minutes are a beautiful stretch of filmmaking. Jack and Ennis both show up at the titular mountain in Wyoming, looking for work herding sheep. It's 1963, so they're fairly clean-cut young men looking to get a start. The story takes its time developing their friendship. Scenes of the two working with the sheep or roughhousing around camp balance nicely with late-night conversations by the fire, in which each shares little but significant details about his families and childhood experiences. I haven't read the Annie Proulx short story on which the movie is based, but you can sense her careful attention to character and dialogue.

It helps that Jake Gyllenhaal (Jarhead) and Heath Ledger (A Knight's Tale) are as believable as they are. Jake Gyllenhaal offers a solid performance as the more outgoing Jack, but it's Heath Ledger, as Ennis, who's likely to steal the acting kudos this awards season. His taciturn, mumbling performance is exquisitely nuanced. Simple dialogue like "It's a one-shot thing we got going on around here" carries so much more meaning when it comes out of his mouth. Director Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) is no slouch, either, and his use of twilight, firelight, and the grandeur of the Rocky Mountains is impressive.

The friendship reaches a turning point when a night of drinking and a cold snap send both men into the tent (the two have usually slept separately). Jack makes the first aggressive move, and Ennis initially resists his sexual advances, but it's not long before those inhibitions are stripped away. What follows is a fairly explicit sex scene; and though the movie doesn't have any more, it does feature a substantial amount of snuggling and kissing between the two leads.

Much of the talk at the Toronto Film Festival, where _Brokeback Mountain_ screened, was how all this gay sex would go over in middle America and whether the movie might strike a mighty blow for tolerance. I have no idea about the former (though I'm guessing many audience members will be surprised), and I don't really care about the latter. It's not that I'm against tolerance, but I don't see how that should affect my opinion of the film (or whether I encourage you to see it). I didn't up-grade my rating of Fahrenheit 9/11 because I thought Michael Moore's documentary might sway some voters last year, and I've largely avoided the slew of anti-Bush/anti-big business documentaries that have flooded the arthouses.

That's not to say a movie's message is irrelevant. I firmly believe that one of the highest qualities art can achieve is to represent reality, to show people the world (or a part of the world) in a way they haven't seen before, and I applaud films that try to make a point, whether it be political, religious, cultural, etc. But if that message is delivered in a mediocre package, then it's incumbent upon film critics to say so and not to obscure that fact in the hopes that "middle America" might see the movie and be transformed.

If Brokeback's last 90 minutes were as good as its first 45, I'd agree that it's one of the best films of the year. But the last two-thirds--after Jack and Ennis go their separate ways, marry, and start families--are genuinely disappointing. The biggest problem is that the narrative shifts from covering a summer in almost an hour to traversing 20 years in just an hour and a half. It's like a rock skipping across a pond, hitting the high points of the relationship and then dribbling out at the end. The intensity and attention to detail that exists in the first section can't be sustained when you skip ahead three or four years every scene. You get hints of Ennis's relationship with his two daughters and Jack's battles with his father-in-law, but they don't have the same clarity or power of the central relationship.

The story has a chance to develop when Ennis's wife Alma (played with tremendous subtlety by Michelle Williams) catches Jack and Ennis in a passionate kiss: how will she respond? what will Ennis do? how will Jack feel about Ennis's reaction? But the film doesn't do anything with that. Alma is soon taken out of the picture, and we're back to Jack and Ennis, with a few scenes involving Jack's wife. Unfortunately, Anne Hathaway, who's so desperately trying to grow out of her "princess" clothes, is fine as a young, charismatic rodeo star (in the middle of the film) but much less believable as an older, bored wife and mother.

Even worse, the relationship between Jack and Ennis doesn't change much in those last twenty years. Jack and Ennis get together for "fishing" visits on the mountain where they cuddle and bemoan the fact that they can't be together all the time. At one point, Jack presses Ennis to re-evaluate his life, and Ennis responds, "I'm stuck with what I got here." And so is the movie. 

J. Robert Parks