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His body carved in granite, his jaw clenched so tight words struggle to escape, Heath Ledger's Ennis Del Mar is as much statue as man, an icon struggling to become flesh. Romances favor the conflicted party, and Brokeback Mountain is no exception: Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal's Jack Twist may get equal billing, but Brokeback would be Ennis' movie even if Ledger's titanic performance didn't make it so.

Ang Lee's burnished, melancholy adaptation of E. Annie Proulx's short story takes its cues from Ledger's stony restraint. Its mournful views of the Wyoming countryside (actually Alberta) trust the land to express what the characters cannot. The movie's advance billing as a "gay Western" deprives viewers of the shock that must have greeted New Yorker readers in 1997, when Proulx's laconic tale of weather-worn sheep-tenders gave way to the phrase, "Jack seized his left hand and brought it to his erect cock." Who let the homos on this range?

Catchphrases notwithstanding, Brokeback is more of a post-Western than a genuine oater, an elegy for cowboys who've run out of trail. It's John Wayne at the end of Stagecoach with no sunset to ride off into, no way to free himself from "the blessings of civilization." It's hardly the first movie to hint at what trail hands get up to on those long, cold nights, but it's the first time we've seen one cowboy flip the other over and spit into his palm.

Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana's script slyly tinges the men's relationship with hints of domesticity. Jack goes up the mountain to watch sheep while Ennis stays in camp and cooks; Jack, on his return, launches into a weary I-work-all-day-and-this-is-all-I-get. But then they flip the script: Ennis goes a-wandering and Jack does his best with the canned food. So it is, too, with their sexual bond. Jack brags of his prowess with girls, and makes the first move on the night a freezing Ennis comes into his tent, but Ennis, who says he hasn't "had the opportunity" to sin, takes the top role and spit-lubes like a pro, as if a force greater than knowledge has taken him over.

Subtly but unmistakably, Brokeback Mountain couches Jack and Ennis' love for each other in elemental plea-for-tolerance terms. Ang Lee films Jack and Ennis' first, and only, onscreen fuck as if they were animals clambering for purchase, at once suggesting the urgency of their bottled-up desire and grounding it in their natural surroundings. Even Jack's old pickup spins its rear wheel like a bucking bronc. (Later, there's a much crueler cut from Ennis sodomizing his wife to Jack's bull busting from a rodeo gate.) Hollywood has lived with self-denying, and just plain denied, homosexuals for decades, but Brokeback significantly expands the presence of Jack and Ennis' wives to illustrate the toll their closeted affair takes on those around them. It's hard to know who to envy less: sweet-faced Alma, Ennis' high school sweetheart, who endures her husband's "fishing trips" for years after she's spotted the two men kissing, or brassy cowgirl Lureen (Anne Hathaway), whose marriage to Jack takes on a professional cast without the penny ever dropping.

Unspoken heartbreak is Lee's stock in trade, and Brokeback milks the sentiment for all it's worth, although its placid pacing more often takes you to the verge of tears than past it. As much as Ennis' fear of getting caught—he tells Jack, "This thing gets us again, in the wrong place, in the wrong time, and we're dead"—it's the terror of his own emotions that holds him back. (When he and Jack first part, Ennis is so overcome he begins to retch, as if he could expel his love like a stone.) Jack makes a bold, perhaps unbelievable, proposition that he and Ennis could run away together, but Ennis' jaw shuts tighter than ever. He's thinking back to his childhood, to "Earl and Rich," one of whom was left castrated in a ditch as a warning to other insufficently straight pairs. (The shot his bloodied body recalls the gutted sheep Ennis sees the morning after he and Jack first make love, but also raises the specter of Matthew Shepard, who was gay-bashed and left to die in a Wyoming field much like this one.) "If you can't fix it, you gotta stand it," he tells Jack, but as Brokeback Mountain stretches from 1963 to the early 1980s, you can see the weight start to beat Ennis down. By the time it's done, you can read every one of those years in the weather-beaten flesh around Ennis' eyes.

There's a sense in which Brokeback Mountain is too tasteful for its own good. Rodrigo Prieto's cinematography has a coffee-table sheen more appropriate to the manicured wastes of The Ice Storm than Wyoming's craggy country. When Ennis replaces his trips to Brokeback Mountain with a postcard of it, it's almost redundant. But if the movie is more high-toned than high country, its elegance serves its purposes well. In addition to the criticisms from the right, whose predictable denials of lust in the dust scarcely merit debate, Brokeback has started to take friendly fire as well, accusations that the film is insufficiently radical to merit the attention it's drawn. True, Brokeback Mountain is not Tropical Malady, or even the fluffy, pansexual Côte d'Azur, but its mainstream appeal is exactly what makes the movie radical. It's one thing to have circuit boys bang each other on the gay-fest circuit; quite another to have hot young stars cradle each other's faces at the multiplex. Even more than their impulsive deflowering, it's Jack and Ennis' firelit embrace that generates the greatest shock, perhaps because their masculine aggression has been traded for a feminine vulnerability. Ultimately, Brokeback Mountain isn't a Western. It's a weepie.

Brokeback Mountain

Directed by Ang Lee A Focus Features release Opens Friday at Ritz Five and Ritz East