Though much acclaimed, not so much for its frank gay love story, but for being the first gay make-out pic suitable for and pitched at straights, Ang Lee’s film comes exactly 20 years after Stephen Frears pulled off the same trick in the far superior MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE. And Frears did it without over-saturated scenic wonders blessing the courtship. (He also avoided the de rigeur gay victimization customary even for the most sympathetic gay-themed pics of the time.) Heath Ledger & Jake Gyllenhaal are very fine, with Ledger’s ‘still waters run deep’ characterization stealing the movie, and the script is beautifully structured to casually get us through close to two decades of their relationship. But when Lee finally puts his neck on the line with an artsy, but stunning piece of grotesquerie (its when Ledger visits the sterile parental home of Gyllenhaal), you suddenly realize how dry-eyed most of the story has left you.
PostScript: Well, after Heath Ledger’s tragic early death a couple of years after writing this, I don’t think many would still be left ‘dry-eyed.’
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