Brokeback Mountain **** out of ****

An exercise in humanity and humility (in case you thought it was a statement movie)

The deepest wounds to "Brokeback Mountain" have been inflicted by those who trumpet as more than the humble masterpiece that it is. A breakthrough picture for gay rights...a torch for tolerance...such bouquets diminish the universal themes found in the movie's story of two men - one gay, one confused, both broken - and their 20-year love affair after a summer herding sheep in the Wyoming highlands. "Brokeback Mountain" drips with longing and regret that knows no sexual orientation.

Director Ang Lee opens his picture in a gravel parking lot occupied by Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal). They're silent strangers brought together by ranch manager Joe Aguirre (Randy Quaid). Jack's estranged from his father. Ennis' dad is dead. Aside from the job, that's their first bond. They swap jobs once on the mountain. They drink whiskey, shoot coyotes, curse the beans in tomato sauce. Jack makes a move one night when they both sleep in the tent. Ennis relents. The experience and the totality of the summer ruins him.

The Academy Award winning screenplay from Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana explores how the men live on unsteadily, marry women, have children, and get together one or twice a year for a "fishing trip." That's a change from E. Annie Proulx's source short story, which mostly recounts Ennis and Jack's arguments and passions during their encounters. What Lee, McMurtry and Ossana transform her story into is an epic that reveals the pain Ennis spreads to his wife Alma (Michelle Williams), the daughter most like him (Kate Mara) and, after divorcing Alma, to a hopeful waitress named Cassie (Linda Cardellini).

Jack has more of an agreement with his hardened Daddy's girl Lureen (Anne Hathaway) than a marriage - "we could do it over the phone," he tells Ennis - and it frees him to make as many trips to Mexican bathhouses as he chooses. Jack's a dreamer, and he begs Ennis to work a ranch with him. Ennis answers with a childhood story about a couple cowboys who live together, "tough old birds," who were found beaten and castrated at the bottom of a ditch. It goes on like that, Jack wanting more than Ennis will give. Jack wants the summer eternal. Ennis, broke, estranged from his own children, unable to look his ex-wife in the eye, is also wracked with love and lust, yet empty, distant.

For all its anguish, "Brokeback Mountain" has a lovely, good-natured screenplay full of small asides and local humor, probably courtesy of McMurtry ("Lonesome Dove," "The Last Picture Show"). It allows us to enjoy the men as men, the women as women, a laugh as a laugh. Lee orchestrates a particularly good scene on Thanksgiving, where a long-running feud between Jack and his father-in-law culminates in an argument over whether Jack's son can watch TV during dinner. Lee is a model of restraint in every scene but one, where a buff Jack washes his torso while Ennis sits in the foreground, cooking beans. Lee has already helmed a domestic masterpiece in "The Ice Storm;" he combines his ability to reveal dining-table truths with artistic helicopter shots of the mountain.

Ledger is some actor. It takes range to play the burdened Ennis, Casanova and surfer hippie ("The Lords of Dogtown") in one year. He is the picture of repression in "Brokeback Mountain" a character worth genuine pity who, when he finds the right words for his daughter in the movie's last scene, has accomplished a feat 20 years in the waiting. That he reserves it for her is overlooked by most critics - Proulx's story doesn't have this ending - but crucial to appreciating what Ennis has learned. Gyllenhaal is 25, yet he plays the older Jack fiercely. He's a selfish SOB, but hard not to like. Both twang and spit the distinctive cowboy chatter of the screenplay with ease. Williams and Hathaway convey enough in short onscreen bursts, and the pretty Mara, like Ledger, transmits a lot through her silences.

To its end, "Brokeback Mountain" refuses to underline itself. It is a calm, sad, loving sigh of a thing. So while the inevitable, crude backlash is unfortunate, Lee does his own efforts no great favor to rewrite his film as an event or monument when it was made on a modest budget as modest movie about average men. And Proulx's letter to the Academy following the movie's Best Picture loss to "Crash" is arrogant and damaging to the potential audience it could reach. This is a work of art. Not an essay. Pop culture has done it few favors. Maybe time will.