Look beyond its sexual orientation and all the commotion surrounding the “gay western” tag, and Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain is a startlingly conventional picture, a weepie at heart. Adapted from E. Annie Proulx’s short story, the film’s presentation of homosexuality is naturalistic, completely sans stereotypical signifiers of the loud camp variety, rather treating it as straight as possible: these are two people in love, they just happen to be men -- and cowboys. In the best moments, the film is infused with a palpable sense of yearning between the characters played by Gyllenhaal and Ledger, both struggling in a life-long search for a harmonious relationship. Editing in the second half could’ve been smoother; the choppy compression of time causes the film to drag. But it’s held together by the excellent performances from the cast, with Ledger’s completely immersive, tightly wound Oscar-ready turn as Ennis an obvious standout. For all the hype, Brokeback Mountain isn’t quite the solution to same-sex-union intolerance that it might’ve been trumpeted to be, it does, in its own quietly haunting way, manage to subvert a generally masculine genre that’s rarely been this romantic.