Movie Week: Brokeback Mountain, Munich

1. Brokeback Mountain: it's about two cowboys who fall in love, but get married and have children, yet meet each other very infrequently for fishing trips, because they're both the love of each other's lives, although they can't live out this love in the eyes of the world.

The film is "award-winning" good and worthy, but not great. It's great in one crucial scene, where the two male lovers finally yell at each other, which makes the whole movie worthwhile. Do take your homophobic friends; definitely something to open their minds.

The movie follows the source material of the Annie Proulx short story remarkably faithfully (and adds stuff about the hetero life with wives). Question: so why is the story still better? Answer: it's not Hollywoodized. In the film, the two guys are Hollywood pretty boys delivering excellent performances. If they were the regular guys they're supposed to be, it could've been a great film.

Personally, I don't think the movie should've been given to Ang Lee to direct. He has taste, but lacks deep insight. A better director would've been Bruce Beresford -- his Tender Mercies shows he could've turned this excellent material into a masterpiece. BTW, Heath Ledger does a very good turn as a taciturn, torn cowboy.

Controversy: is this a movie about:
(a) two straight men who happen to fall in love, or
(b) two repressed homosexuals, the one not quite as repressed as the other?
I believe Annie Proulx meant it to be (a). Even though that feeds into an invidious gay stereotype, that gay guys are all about sex, and can't really fall in love, so you'd have to be straight to really love each other. (a) makes it a more interesting movie though, but I suspect most people will read it as (b).

There's more to this question about why the short story is better than the movie, and I think it has to do with the two forms themselves. Movie images fill the mind and fix things without resonance. Words on the page resonate in the mind, spark it like a firecracker. Movie images literally leave nothing to the imagination; the language of a good novel leaves everything to the imagination.
Movies and novels are both about story, and try to sweep you along in their worlds, but they're immersive in different ways: a movie renders you totally passive because it fully engages two senses, sight and sound, while a novel invites you to participate, because it engages no senses, only the mind.
Movies are too literal in how they mimic reality; they're reality-bound. Novels are not reality-bound. The form is more abstract; it takes flight, and creates space instead of filling it.

Very few directors can overcome the built-in reality-bound narrowness of the movie form: to my mind, only Ingmar Bergman achieves true resonance in his movies, perhaps because he sticks so closely to the human face -- which is the one visibly concrete thing that can resonate in the mind, since it's inherently the most mysterious image of all.

2. Munich: Spielberg movie -- Israel puts together a Mossad team to wipe out the Palestinians who planned the massacre of their athletes at the Munich Olympics. The team proceeds to kill half the targets on their list. The team leader agonizes about the morality of what he's doing, and whether it even helps Israel in any practical way.

I found it a bore. But then, though I like Spielberg's fun movies, I shrug at his "serious" ones. He's simply too sentimental and pop to be taken seriously. His virtuosity is mindless, and works well with mindless entertainment. You need more than virtuosity to do serious, though; you need an actual mind, which you don't get if you grow up in Hollywood. If Spielberg wants a mind, he should leave LA and go live somewhere else.

Co-written by a mind, Angels in America playwright Tony Kushner, the film fails, I think, because the agonizing team leader is a walking issue instead of a live character. It's a mistake many artists make when they try to cover an issue: they create a character who "represents" the issue, and then forget to give that character actual characteristics.

And then, of course, Spielberg always missteps when he tries to make some "serious" cinematic "aesthetic" choice. In this one his main character agonizes in the middle of a fuck; a seemingly great and daring choice. Well, you have to see it to believe how it doesn't work at all. Strangely for Spielberg, even the action scenes in this movie aren't all that gripping.

I must say, I also find the hyped-up controversy about a supposed moral "equivalence" between Israelis and Palestinians in the movie boring, too. The movie is firmly on the side of Israel. If it really did establish a moral equivalence, it would've been more interesting. Somebody should try that.
As far as I can see, the Israelis and the Palestinians are totally morally equivalent in their enthusiasm and gusto for offing each other. They're also equivalent in how they depict themselves as each other's victims, when they're actually each other's gleeful aggressors.