And that's where the professed unconventionality of "Brokeback Mountain" becomes threadbare. The movie's ultra-sensitive, ultra-tasteful sense of daring is really just a scrim for some pretty conventional cautionary impulses. This is what comes of denying your true nature: You get stuck with a frowsy, unhappy wife in a shabby housecoat, clutching a coffee cup as she stares into space.

But then, of course, this isn't the wives' movie: It's a movie in which women don't figure much at all. Jack and Ennis are essentially early-'60s-type men, and although the movie does give us a few scenes showing Ennis tending to his sick daughters, and one of Jack driving his son around in a big tractor, most of the child-rearing is left to the womenfolk. The movie occasionally pretends to be mildly interested in these jilted spouses, particularly Ennis' wife, Alma, played by Michelle Williams. Williams, an expressive actress who's only just beginning to find out what she can do, has some good scenes, although mostly she's required to suffer silently in the couple's dismal flat. (Ennis works hard as a ranch hand, but he never makes quite enough to support his family, let alone buy paint or lightbulbs.)

But Anne Hathaway, as Jack's wife, Lureen, barely registers as a character. When we first meet her -- she's a young rodeo princess with a wild sex drive and an even wilder smile -- she jolts the movie awake like a pistol shot. But as the story limps along, moving from the '60s to the mid-'70s, her outfits get progressively louder and her teased tresses progressively blonder. She's a hairhopper by necessity, as if Lee had reached his quota of real human beings and needed to fill out the corners of his story with cartoons. Her final scene, in particular, is baffling. Lee directs it in such a way that we have no idea what it means: We go through the whole picture with no idea how she feels about her husband, and the movie's ending gives us no further clues.

The focus, obviously, is supposed to be on Jack and Ennis, with as few pesky distractions as possible. Ennis is the silent type, and Ledger plays him as a man who's desperate to keep his feelings from leaking through his skin, sealing off every potential outlet: He squints through his most emotional moments, afraid to let any light in or out; and almost miraculously, he gets through a whole movie's worth of lines -- albeit spare ones -- while barely moving his lips. Ledger needs to clue us in to what Ennis is thinking and feeling without ever showing us, but the best he can do is to give us a reflective blank, a slate on which we can scribble our own ideas about what might be going on in his head, and his heart.

Gyllenhaal's eyes are as wide-open as Ledger's are shuttered -- they're huge, voracious and anxiously needy. Jack wants more from Ennis than he can give, and Gyllenhaal is at his best in the scenes where he just steps over the line of daring to plead. His overturned pride is far more visible in his face than it is in his reading of desperate courtship lines like "We can meet in November. Kill us a nice elk."

Dumb lines like that are essential to "Brokeback Mountain" -- its script is by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, who also served as producers on the film -- lest we somehow miss the point that these are "real" men, not the sissified types we hire to redecorate our houses and arrange our flowers. And the movie makes that point with far more subtlety elsewhere, particularly in its early scenes, where Jack and Ennis wrestle and roughhouse in a way that's neither sexual nor asexual but just casually boyish: When the movie opens, they are very young men, after all.

With "Brokeback Mountain," Lee's intention, clearly, was to give us a romance between men, as opposed to a gay romance. This is a story about lovers separated by circumstance -- that they both happen to be men isn't inconsequential, but it isn't the central defining factor of their existence, either.

But even though "Brokeback Mountain" is a movie about feelings, it never deigns to have any itself. It's a thesis film masquerading as a melodrama -- there's something clinical about the way it keeps its two lovers so clearly focused under its microscope, documenting their hopes, their fears, their desperation, in a way that's calculated to avoid alienating the straightest of straight audiences. The greatest movie romances require us to make a leap with the lovers; this one keeps us at a safe remove from the edge. "Brokeback Mountain" isn't the revolutionary picture it might have been. Even so, it would be a greater tragedy if this failed attempt to tell a story about men in love turned out to be just a onetime curiosity, instead of a beginning.

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