Brokeback Mumble
Unlike Michael Medved, I don’t think that you can get AIDS from listening to Tchaikovsky–unless you share the phonograph needle. So I was not afraid to watch “Brokeback Mountain.” Yet, after viewing the film, I was dismayed by an unspeakable act. And I mean that literally: the actors could not speak.
Heath Ledger mumbled. I couldn’t understand a word that he was saying. Granted he is Australian, which is generally acknowledged as the most hideous mutation of English. So he has that verbal handicap. Perhaps he was trying to embody the western icon of the “strong, silent type.” But I could still understand Gary Cooper whenever he grunted “yup.” Ledger lacked that clarity.
Jake Gyllenhaal was slightly more audible, but it still seemed that he and Ledger were having an incoherence contest. You know that a film needs subtitles when Randy Quaid sounds the closest to John Gielgud.
“Brokeback Mountain” makes me wonder: it is the love that dares not speak its name, or just cannot enunciate it?