Let me start off by saying.. if any of you, straight or gay havnt seen this movie.. plz do so now...
[spoilers follow]:
I loved this movie and almost everything about it but the tagline ("Love is a force of nature"
which strikes me as cheesy and contrived. I think the tagline should have been "If you can't fix it, you've got to stand it".
The fact that Jack and Ennis have wives and Jack has affairs with other men doesn't really cheapen Jack and Ennis' relationship because Jack and Ennis don't really have a relationship. Ennis' life is a series of frustrations and disappointments because his central problem is that he loves someone deeply and has no context for that sort of emotion. In rural 1963 Wyoming to be queer was to be something less than a man, which is unthinkable to Ennis. Ennis and Jack are never even able to say, "I love you" to each other, despite the obviousness of the bond between them and are stuck with brief, impassioned, stolen time with each other. Jack being a little braver and a little more self-aware has dreams of them actually having a life together, something Ennis views as impossible and foolish. Their tragedy is that they're never really together, but never really able to get past their feelings for each other. I also loved Michelle Williams in this film, and felt she gave depth and pathos to Alma, a woman whose frustration and bottled rage mirrors her husband's. I didn't feel any of the sex scenes were gratuitous and felt that both scenes with Alma established important points about her relationship with her husband. Also, I'm not certain that the man in Mexico was necessarily a prostitute, he could have been a no-strings-attached hookup.
Mainly, I loved the ordinariness of this movie. Jack and especially Ennis were pretty plain people with nothing really distinguishing them beyond the fact that they were in love with each other without any sort of direction to go in.
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41yrs • M • 
