Buy it... if you are a Country music collector and you specifically enjoyed the mellow underscore interspersed with the songs in the film.

Avoid it... if you are a traditional film score collector or you despise the twang of American Country music, from today and yesteryear.

Santaolalla

Brokeback Mountain: (Gustavo Santaolalla) First published as a short story in The New Yorker in 1997, E. Annie Proulx's heartbreaking tale has been adapted with much acclaim by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana for Ang Lee's full, feature length film, Brokeback Mountain. The true mastery of the film in critics' viewpoint has been Lee's ability to tell the story with the kind of intimate focus on personal tragedy that keeps Brokeback Mountain from becoming a melodramatic farce or a stereotypical "gay cowboy" representation. Two male ranch hands unexpectedly discover their affection for each other as teens and immediately deny that their haphazard intercourse ever happened. As they marry and carry on with their lives over several years, they go on "fishing trips" that yield no fish, and the inevitable sadness of their predicament manifests itself when the wife of one of them finally confronts the men after witnessing them kiss. By the end, it's hard to know if everything we're seeing exists in flashback or as part of an imagined future, but the emotional weight of either result is never in doubt. Whether the quality of the film will cause it to be truly acceptable to the macho heterosexual cowboys that recently got back from the rodeo national competitions in Las Vegas is another matter; the sad irony about Brokeback Mountain is that the film will likely play best in places the furthest from today's active ranch hands, for the moral of story that the father of the Ennis character in the film tells is so pervasive in rural, homophobic Rocky Mountain culture today.

Ang Lee has said that he has taken many chances recently in his career (everything surrounding The Hulk was one big chance), and for Brokeback Mountain, Lee would avoid the sounds of an American Western artist and choose Argentinean musician/producer/composer Gustavo Santaollala to write a delicate underscore and produce several songs for the film. A regular collaborator with director Alejandro Gonz‡lez I–‡rritu (21 Grams), Santaollala announced his presence in American film score composing with his award recognition for The Motorcycle Diaries. Now based in California, Santaolalla has produced for the Mexican bands Molotov and CafŽ Tacuba and continues to produce songs for American soundtracks. While Santaolalla's music for movies has involved a certain amount of experimentation, his work here is highly predictable, conservative, and subdued. The film had song usage in mind from the start, and Santaolalla wrote multiple classically-inclined country ballads for Emmylou Harris and Mary McBride that have both been very well received by Country music collectors. The album's emphasis on these songs causes the overall emphasis to be quite lively, although the older hits by Steve Earle ("The Devil's Right Hand," 1987) and Linda Ronstandt (the Buddy Holly cover, "It's So Easy," 1977) are tired and misplaced. The original songs (and adaptations) by Santaolalla , despite the considerable interest from the mainstream, are not all eligible for Oscar consideration. A committee from AMPAS deemed some of the song content ineligible because it is "not clearly audible or intelligible," and the Golden Globes side-stepped the traditional songs completely by nominating the title theme of Santaolalla's own score for an award.

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The Santaolalla score was separately nominated for a Golden Globe as well, and this is exactly the kind of nomination that drives traditional film score collectors nuts. Santaolalla's underscore is definitely underplayed in the film, although its influence is strong. Its Western simplicity will not turn heads for those orchestral score fans, and Brokeback Mountain is therefore not recommended for that crowd. Santaolalla's ensemble consists of acoustic guitar, slide guitar, and a small string section. Very minimalistically rendered, Santaolalla returns to the same chord progressions (a theme of sorts) over and over again, never varying the content much but definitely sending us off with an inspiring flourish of this theme in "The Wings" (a highlight cue for the entire year, despite the score's overall shortcomings). If there were to be a significant criticism leveled at Santaolalla for his underscore, it would be that his music is sonic mush rather than kind of emotionally deep accompaniment that the film may have benefited from. There is no structural framework for the various settings, nor are there defined motifs for different aspects of each character's lives. A very short running time for each orchestral cue (13 minutes total) causes these non-descipt cues to become quickly lost on album (a sad circumstance that even the avid Country collectors are bemoaning), and for score collectors interested in a Western score that bridges the gap between Western elements and an orchestra, try All the Pretty Horses from a few years ago. But Country fans will swoon for Santaolalla's easy sounds and well-produced country songs, and it is in light of this achievement that the album is selling like hotcakes.   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

Music as Written for Film: ***
Music as Heard on Album: **
Overall: ***