As gorgeous or as disturbing as the film’s imagery is, you never want a scene to end. Isolated and overworked, Jack and Heath Ledger’s Enis bemoan the lack of supplies and the constant wind. You feel for them as they long for anything but beans. Even the potatoes and milk are in short supply on Brokeback Mountain, and you can easily understand the longing they feel, whether for work, for food, or for each other. When Enis strips down to wash himself off, he’s blurry in the background, but Jack is in focus, wanting to look but knowing he’d better not. We wish the shot was in focus; we want Jack to look. Conversely, when Jack washes his clothes in the river, naked except for cowboy boots, just the touch of his stick against his long johns seems so in tune with the river’s rushing flow that the nudity is as natural as the landscape.

Heath Ledger received a lot of attention for carrying the film, and it’s well-deserved, but I can’t think of anyone better for the role of Jack than Gyllenhaal, whose oversized eyes and soft, high voice convey a vulnerability that overshadows his fairly substantial frame. You can tell why Anne Hathaway’s Lureen wants to marry this poor kid, even against her rich father’s objections. Jack is someone who longs for success in the environment he’s in, but he’s obviously in the wrong environment. He escapes to Mexico to cruise for guys. He returns to Wyoming the next summer to see if Enis might possibly be around again.

I was worried that Hollywood would take this story about the impediments to same-sex relationships and make it an Oprah Winfrey Show-style exercise about cheating on women. Luckily, the female characters are portrayed sympathetically without them seeming like castraters or victims. We definitely feel for Michelle Williams as Alma when she struggles to work as a grocery clerk in the wake of Enis’s unpredictable, borderline abusive behaviour. When she says, “I’d have more of your children if you’d support them,” again the audience gasped.

In the context of this story about stunted same-sex love, it’s reassuring to see that Ledger and Gyllenhaal wrapped up in each other’s arms in a motel room doesn’t look odd or, worse, like two straight guys faking it. All the characters might be impossibly good-looking, namely Enis’s teenaged daughter, but by their dialogue and their (really fine) acting, and the attention to detail in the sets and costumes, you’d expect to find these people in these crummy houses and barren landscapes. The stunningly bare walls of Jack's parents' house demonstrate their hard-nosed attitudes better than any words could.

One noticeable aspect to the film is it’s use of silence. There’s a minimal score, and it seems in this that the director wants us to be aware of the constant wind, the slow pace of life, the absence of modern technology. Enis’s famous line, ‘If you can’t fix it, you’ve got to stand it,” is about as good as any I’ve heard in a film, especially coupled with the few violent images with that tyre iron. Jack begins to get a reputation as gay, and he’s even rebuffed by rodeo clowns. The closed community of hard-drinking ranchers and rodeos becomes a terrible trap, and his later marriage to Lureen seems like such a safe haven you can’t blame him for wanting it. Brokeback Mountain is being billed as a love story, but it’s really a tragedy, and if you leave feeling emotionally robbed, that’s the point. The next morning you’ll think of Enis and the fireworks just above his head, or Gyllenhaal and that lamb, and realize you’re richer now than when you showed up at the cinema.

Proulx says in the introduction to Close Range, the story collection Brokeback appears in, that all the stories have an air of improbability to them. True enough, it’s difficult to imagine a twenty-year long affair between two people who have lost track of each other, sometimes for four years at a time. Or that both of them were willing to continue this over decades. There’s a huge difference between fact and fiction, but Matthew Shepard was killed a year after this story was published not thirty miles from Proulx’s home in Wyoming. Perhaps that’s another reason the story resonates with so many.

The BAFTAs and Oscars love big, sweeping, visually stunning epics, so it's no wonder this one was a favourite. It's now 14 years since the release of the film and it still ranks as the most finacially successful LGBT-themed film ever made, having grossed $178 million at the box office since its release. The tragic death of Heath Ledger just 3 years after the film's release has only served to make this movie some special to cherish.

Matt Rauscher is the author of the novel The Unborn Spouse Situation.

Brokeback Mountain this week and is still available on DVD from Amazon.

OutUK interviews Jake Gyllenhaal