Movie Review	Movie Reviews Archive

Now that Brokeback Mountain has opened across the country-- garnering mostly positive reviews and enormous good will-- it is clear that those people who pay attention to "gay movies" have been gripped by Brokeback fever. This is, apparently-- and just as its publicists have been telling us-- the most important gay film in years, and maybe the most important ever made. Queer magazines are filled with ads and feature stories, and the GLAAD website has a special "Brokeback Mountain Resource Guide"-- all Brokeback all the time!

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Sure, it's fine, sure it's well made, and it's a little boring, and really-- by the end-- not all that interesting. But clearly, Brokeback Mountain-- with its tragic, doomed, love and its cute-guys-in-Stetsons and its publicity-machine-- has captured the queer imagination. Which is perfectly OK-- I mean, one of the other media events constantly promoted on GLAAD's website is "Desperate Housewives" (an indicator of how idiotic and shallow that organization actually is). But let's not forget that there are plenty of other queer-related and queer-nuanced movies out there that GLAAD, and gay media outlets, never mention.

Unreality's better

If you're interested in more mainstream movies I'd suggest taking a look at The Brothers Grimm, directed by Terry Gilliam, and one of the gayer films this year, and certainly-- in terms of sensibility-- gayer than Brokeback Mountain. Gilliam, who has written and directed such diverse films as Time Bandits, Monte Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail, and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen has produced a wonderful meditation on the importance of the imagination and the exhilaration of making believe. While the film focuses on the real-life brothers, the collectors of the famous fairy tales, Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm-- played by Matt Damon and Heath Ledger (who is much gayer here than in Brokeback)-- it wrenches them from any historical reality and places them in a "real life" fairly tale. In the film, Wilhelm and Jacob are not nascent anthropologists and literary men, but con-artists who invent supernatural dangers such as witches, ghosts, and trolls to frighten small German villages and then hire themselves out to exorcize the manufactured monsters.

But Gilliam is not interested in this as a shaggy-dog (shaggy-troll?) story, but rather as a way to contrast what it means to deal with the world as a realist versus dealing with it as a person with imagination. Wilhelm Grimm is a hard-line pragmatist who views the world as a place to plunder. Jacob, on the other hand, believes in the power of fantasy and invention. The film's plot quickly brings the brothers to a crisis-of-world-views as one of the scams gets them into trouble, and they find themselves battling actual supernatural powers, not those of their own conjuring. Needless to say pragmatic Will, who thinks he owns the world, is at a terrible disadvantage in dealing with the supernatural incarnate, and Jacob-- who has always been made fun of for being a fanciful (and let's face it, probably gay) brother-- is called upon the save the day.

Gilliam's world-- as usual-- is rife and ripe with imaginative wonders and The Brothers Grimm is a treat to watch. Like Time Bandits and The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen-- both of which were very underestimated and under-praised when they were released in the 1980s-- The Brothers Grimm is a paean to the brilliance and the elasticity of the human imagination and its constant battle against what many people would call reality, but which is, in essence, a world created by a limited understanding of what is possible. While The Brothers Grimm is not gay, in the usual sense of the word, it is certainly queer in the best sense of the word.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com