New Yorker critic Anthony Lane’s review of Brokeback Mountain is one of the most insightful I’ve read so far, and one of the best for Heath Ledger’s chances for being nominated for a Best Actor Oscar. “”In the end, this is Ledger’s picture…[it is he] who bears the yoke of the movie’s sadness,” Lane concludes. “His voice is a mumble and a rumble, not because he is dumb but because he hopes that, by swallowing his words, he can swallow his feelings, too. In his mixing of the rugged and the maladroit, he makes you realize that Brokeback Mountain is no more a cowboy film than The Last Picture Show. (Both screenplays were written by Larry McMurtry, the earlier in collaboration with Peter Bogdanovich, this one with Diana Ossana.) Each is an elegy for tamped-down lives, with an eye for vanishing brightness of which Jean Renoir would have approved, and you should get ready to crumple at Brokeback Mountain‘s final shot: Ennis alone in a trailer, looking at a postcard of Brokeback Mountain and fingering the relics of his time there, with a field of green corn visible, yet somehow unreachable, through the window. This slow and stoic movie, hailed as a gay Western, feels neither gay nor especially Western: it is a study of love under siege. As Ennis says, ‘If you can’t fix it, Jack, you gotta stand it.'”