Now that almost every major critics group has sanctified it as the best of the year, with the Hollywood Foreign Press in step and the Academy likely to follow, it’s time to come out against Brokeback Mountain. There are plenty of reasons why I expected to love it, my longstanding admiration for Ang Lee and the promise of a truly compelling, mainstream gay love story chief among them. So I wasn’t entirely prepared for the sinking feeling I felt in my stomach as I sat watching Anne Hathaway’s endless parade of bad wigs (note to Ang Lee: period or geographic flavor be damned; if every gay man in the country is going to see your movie, it’s best to not make your actress up to look like a third-rate drag queen) and some makeup-induced aging worthy of a high school musical. Certainly, I could admit, there were plenty of things to admire, most notably Ledger’s and Michelle Williams’s revelatory performances, but the whole thing felt clunky and remote, workmanlike at best. And in the central love story Ledger and Gyllenhaal are both a little too internal; the half hour or so that precedes their eruption doesn’t exactly smolder with energy, romantic, sexual, or otherwise. Brokeback Mountain has plenty of gay sex, but it lacks sensuality. Lee’s achieved that elusive sense of longing before with Crouching Tiger and The Wedding Banquet, but this film feels curiously unmotivated, almost contrived.

I wish it ended there, but Brokeback Mountain’s aesthetic importance pales next to its so-called cultural significance. So I find it necessary to be completely clear on my real problem with the film: Brokeback Mountain simply does not go far enough. I’m still rooting for it ­ as a gay man living in the America George Bush has wrought, the success of Brokeback Mountain feels far more important than it should—but I’m doing so half-heartedly. It occupies a cultural and political position analogous to the Sixties Civil Rights-themed films that, in hindsight, were made expressly for the edification of white liberals. I can’t help thinking that, 30 years from now, when people look back on Brokeback Mountain as some kind of cultural touchtone, they’ll also see it as a curious oddity—more craven than bold, content to contemplate the shape and texture of the closet door rather than to burst through it.

Lee’s film tells the stories of two men: Ennis (Ledger), who feels the burden of repression so strongly that he denies what he wants—and potentially, who he is—and Jack (Gyllenhaal), who feels his identity with a force that cannot be contained. The film aligns itself completely with Ennis’s point-of-view (not insignificantly, he’s the top in the relationship), and so we see the climactic tragedy at its center through his eyes only. By making that choice, Lee’s film wallows in the very repression that paralyzes its protagonist. Artistically, that might be a valid choice, and it’s worked for Lee before. Politically, though, there’s something dangerous—at the very least, we can admit, inadequate—in the way Ennis and, eventually, the film seem to suggest that some things simply must be kept in the closet, for the price of doing otherwise would prove far too high. Gyllenhaal’s Jack Twist would almost certainly disagree— indeed, with such fervor that he would stake his life on it—but the film never really gives us that point-of-view. It’s Ennis’s voice that we hear almost exclusively, reminding us, “If you can’t fix it, you just gotta stand it.” Fine. In the meantime, I’ll wait for a mainstream gay film that says something truly progressive and courageous, namely: “If you can’t stand it, you just gotta fix it.”