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TORONTO (updated 9/12/05) -- A pair of terrific Westerns (re-)appeared on the horizon at the 30th Toronto Film Festival: Ang Lee's "Brokeback Mountain," fresh from Telluride, a film of magnificent natural landscapes and reigned-in emotional and sexual energy; and Tommy Lee Jones' "The Three Burials of Meliqueles Estrada," a sur-prize-winner at Cannes, which ... well, I love more than anything I've seen in years.
Both are films about male friendship, and grounded in the psychological reality that, while women tend to associate intimacy with shared feelings, men see it more in terms of shared experiences -- especially (in these two movies) doing a "job of work" together. And sharing stories around a campfire.
Like the worm at the bottom of a bottle of tequila, "Three Burials" is steeped in a potent and intoxicating distillation of south-of-the-border elements, including vintage Mexican views of honor, friendship, death and redemption. A meaningless killing becomes a quest for Meaning (with a capital "M"), a journey that takes two men and a corpse across the border from Texas into Mexico, over Sisyphean mountains and into the valley of the shadow of death, where they find hell on earth (or, as a friend insists, not quite hell but purgatory), and heaven in the river valley.
Roger Ebert saw it at Cannes and briefly described it as "The Head of Alfredo Garcia Meets the Treasure of the Sierra Madre." Absolutely true -- the movie has the blood of Sam Peckinpah running through its veins (and I'm not referring to its violence but its lifeblood) -- particularly "Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia" and "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid." Its morbidly funny and moving story is indebted to William Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying" and its surreal sense of absurdity and mortality to Spanish master Luis Bunuel (who, you may recall, also made a number of films in Mexico), with its primal images of ants, decomposing remains, snakes, and feet.
Indeed, you could say it's a movie about Barry Pepper's feet. (I know I did.) The images of feet, the parts of the body most in contact with the earth, recur throughout the film and suggest the vulnerability and corruptibility of the flesh. Lest we forget: We've always got at least one foot in the grave.
This is a great film, the first I've seen in years that made me feel like leaping to my feet and cheering at the end -- not because it has any kind of rah-rah ending, but because the epic, elegiac journey reaches such a wholly and soulfully satisfying conclusion.
I have so many more wonderful movies to write about -- including "Brokeback Mountain," "Cache" (or "Hidden"), "The Giant Buddhas," "Capote," "The History of Violence," "L'Enfer" -- and even "Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic" -- but I've run out of time at the moment. Off to another screening...
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About six hours later...
My enthusiasm for "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada" knows no bounds. Only five years in, I can already say with confidence that it's one of the great films of the 21st century. Because if it had been released more than five years ago, it would have been one of the great films of the 20th.
The bad news: I'm told by Leonard Maltin (who heard it directly from producer Michael Fitzgerald) that, astonishingly, "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada" does not have a US distributor yet! That's right -- the best movie of the last several years (IMHO, of course) hasn't been picked up, even after it's Cannes prizes. Online research appears to confirm this, although the film is apparently slated for limited exhibition in November. More information on that as the situation develops.
The good news: "Brokeback Mountain" (yes, I'm finally getting back to it) won big at the Venice Film Festival.
Ang Lee's film is not only a fine and gorgeous Western (in the first act), but an intimate epic love story in the classic Hollywood tradition. A heartbreaking tale about the path not taken, it also views its characters' difficult choices with a clear-eyed understanding of the realities of its time. It begins in 1963, when two cowboys tending a heard of sheep near Brokeback Mountain (beautiful title) come together, get under each other's skin (and into each other's pants), part at the end of the summer and then carry on an intermittent lifelong love affair through marriages, children, jobs, divorces and other lovers.
Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal -- always good in anything) is the more romantic and idealistic of the two men, while Ennis (Heath Ledger in a tamped-down performance that I can honestly call "a revelation") takes a harder, more realistic or pragmatic attitude toward their relationship. One of the movie's great strengths is that it never chooses between them. They'll never know -- and neither will we -- how their lives might have turned out if they'd chosen to ride a different trail together.
In critical shorthand (hey, it's a quick summary in a film festival blog -- I can't get into too much detail right here and now), "Brokeback Mountain" is an obstacle-filled romance in the vein of "Splendor in the Grass." But the emotional lid is sealed as tightly as a can of beans, in the manner of the classic American Westerns of John Ford and Howard Hawks. And that's what makes it so affecting. Small gestures and objects charged with emotional significance -- a mountain, a shirt, a jacket, a bloodstain -- evoke subterranean rivers of feeling.
