It's a shabby little one-street town that's been left to the sun's arson. Only the wind and a passing train disturb the powerful, profound quiet of this scene, which we've seen in thousands of Westerns. Soon, a lone figure will appear on the horizon, entering this landscape that will forever alter his life. But, unlike other Westerns, what Ennis Del Mar will find is a love he cannot begin to understand.

Ennis arrives early at the office of sheep rancher Joe Aguirre, where he's come looking for work as a herder. He's soon joined by another man, Jack Twist, who's also searching for some seasonal employment. The two men don't actually speak to each other until after Aguirre, in his gruff manner, has hired them. Besides, Ennis isn't much for chat anyway. They're soon off to the foothills of the Rockies with Aguirre's flock, and into a relationship neither can escape.

Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain is one of those films that people who haven't even seen it want to talk about. It has, of course, been publicly dubbed the "gay cowboy movie," which does a terrible disservice to this beautiful, haunting film about two men who can never fully free themselves from the fetters of social customs that deny them the chance to love each other openly and honestly.

Brokeback Mountain is an intimate epic of quiet desperation and lyric grief that leaves one feeling, like Ennis, unutterably sad and shaken by the experience. But thankful, too, that it is still possible to go to the cinema and find a human story of such depth and subtlety.

Based on a short story by E. Annie Proulx, the script by Larry McMurtry and Dianna Ossana is a masterwork of both elaboration and concision. Much of Proulx's dialogue has been kept, but the roles of the future wives of Ennis and Jack's have been necessarily expanded to show the effect that these men's secret lives have on their families. Also, McMurty and Ossana have deleted some of Proulx's unfortunate stabs at Freudian psychology, which is the primary flaw in her otherwise moving story.

McMurtry, of course, knows the people that inhabit the squalid, forgotten Western towns, these homes of Hud's Bannons and the Sonny Crawfords and Ruth Poppers of The Last Picture Show. It's a land of limited possibilities and time-bound isolation that creates layers of fear and violence.

Lee, with his jeweler's eye for detail, fully recreates the 1960s world of Ennis and Jack with the same completeness that he brought to Regency England in Sense and Sensibility and to the middle-class New England suburbs of the '70s in The Ice Storm. But as those other films show, Lee is also a great actors' director, and he has generated some memorable performances from his stars here.

Of the two men, it is Jack who is the more likely to take risks. At Ennis' word he would drop family and career to be by his lover's side. As Jack, Jake Gyllenhaal brings a touching boyishness to this yearning figure who is far more free with his feelings than Ennis, though neither of them can ever utter the word "love."

However, it's Heath Ledger's Ennis that is the most surprising performance. His character tries to ride close deputy on his emotions, and nearly succeeds in going through life shut down under complete physical control. But his passion for Jack and the nagging pain of his scuffed heart overwhelm him.

Some of Ledger's scenes test even our own emotional control. When he first leaves Jack, not knowing whether they will see each other again, Ennis has an almost total physical breakdown on the road out of the dead-end town. Years later, having received a note from Jack that he'll be passing through Ennis' town, Ledger plays the waiting Ennis like a caged stray, nervously chain-smoking and killing beers as he longs for his long-lost lover's arrival. The following scene, when Ennis flies from his house to greet Jack, is a portrait of a man who has happily momentarily dropped the soul-slaying disguise of the "real man" role demanded by his culture.