"I read further and met Ennis and Jack, two sheep herders who eke out a kind of strangled, self-loathing love story on the wind-whipped slopes of a mountain in Wyoming in the 1960s. I then realized why The New Yorker had published it not so much the story, or the characters, or the setting, but the prose. My god, the prose. So spare, so austere, so unsentimental yet you could feel everything that was roiling just below its surface."
"When I read that they were making it into a movie one that turns 20 years old this year I figured they'd screw it up. How could they not? Movies can't capture that kind of internal tension. Whenever they try to secure us a purchase inside a character's head, they default to voiceover, which is clumsy and distracting. Then I read that nobody involved in the movie not the screenwriters, director, or lead actors were gay, and I figured: No yeah, this is doomed."
Ennis and Jack are two sheep herders on a Wyoming mountain in the 1960s whose relationship is characterized by a strangled, self-loathing love. The language is spare and austere, keeping deep, roiling emotion beneath the surface through steely restraint in every sentence. That linguistic restraint mirrors Ennis's internalized, performative masculinity and his terror at pure, implacable feelings. The intense interiority makes the material feel intimately tied to language rather than overt expression. Skepticism arises about a film's ability to reproduce that contained internal tension, especially when cinematic techniques default to voiceover or surface gestures.
Read at www.npr.org
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