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All the conspiracy theories are true.

Mark my words. In five, ten, or twenty years, the histrionic whining of Academy-Award-winner Crash will have become a thing of distant, cloudy memory (call it the racial-tension equivalent of fellow Best Picture-winner Marty), but Brokeback Mountain will only increase in reputation and importance.

It’s not a film for everyone’s taste. As much as tree-hugging weirdoes like myself may wish to deny it, the vast majority of Americans still simply don’t care to bother with films about two guys with the hots for one another. But even with its avowed homosexual activity, Brokeback Mountain is an American love story for the ages.

I’m amazing that it escaped the confines of its own premise. This movie about two gay cowboys, Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), who fall in love and try to retain their relationship could have been just another gay melodrama, a movie that played as skin-hungry soft-core set against the backdrop of pretty mountains. Instead, it’s less a movie about men coming to terms with their own sexuality as it is a treatise on what hides behind the laconic deadpans of the archetype American male.

Don’t be fooled; that’s why Brokeback Mountain didn’t garner a huge football-fan following. The film investigates (warts and all) what it means to be male in America. Whether it’s based on sexual desire or not, the abyss of emotion and pent-up frustration that lie behind Ennis and Jack’s reticent facades represent all that’s not said in our lives. No one ever says everything they’d like to say to each person that they come in contact with. (Can you imagine what that would be like?) And from a certain perspective, that diplomatically restrained behavior is what keeps civilized society in balance.

But for these two gentlemen, their relationship is one of the very few things that instills a degree of boundary-free honesty in their lives. Their wives (the astonishing Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway) may possess their husbands’ devotions as far as the conventional world is concerned; Ennis and Jack’s implicit intentions remain unspoken in the presence of their marital beards.

Oscar-winner Ang Lee understands this impeccably. He tells the men’s stories without button-pushing or aesthetic soliloquy; he just shows them doing what they do. There’s very little judgment in Brokeback Mountain, even toward the wives; those characters’ lives are just as compromised as the star- crossed lovers at the film’s center. And that’s what sets this production apart.

Crash is a movie that constantly references its own compensatory judgments with histrionic redundancy, but Brokeback refuses to let its audience off so lightly. The men in the eye of its dramatically emotional storm are not worthy of being defended, not insistent upon empathy or pity; they simply go through the motions of the lives they’ve created. The last line of Annie Proulx’s story upon which the film was based is, “If you can’t fix it, you gotta stand it.” This mentality makes the film both devastating and penetrably realistic.

So, yes, because the film presents its gay romance without the training wheels that Crash offers its multi-racial characters, it proved to be too much for Academy voters. They obviously prefer their thinking-person’s drama with a delicious sugar coating rather than the often bitter sting of real-life situation. But just because Brokeback Mountain didn’t win the prize it most certainly deserved doesn’t make it any less of a film. It’s a big one, whether one realizes it now or later.

The Video: How Does The Disc Look?

The 1.85:1 Anamorphic widescreen transfer afforded Brokeback Mountain on this DVD is quite something. The film’s juxtaposition of lovely character interaction with the staggered, rugged expanse of natural backgrounds make it an easy film to embrace visually, and this transfer does it justice. Black levels and color accuracy are both handled adeptly, and while a bit of grain rears its ugly head every once in a while, most of the transfer offers excellent finely grained detail.

The Audio: How Does The Disc Sound?

Ang Lee creates surprisingly subtle 5.1 mixes for his films, so while on first listen this Dolby Digital track doesn’t fully impress, upon a second visit, its quality appears clean and secure. Dialogue sounds fantastic, and the film’s exploitation of vast atmospherics and an Oscar-winning score work wonders. Again, it’s not exactly perfectly manipulative of its soundscape, but even with what it doesn’t do, it impresses.

Also included are a French Dolby Digital 5.1 track, English, French, and Spanish subtitles, and English Closed Captions.

Supplements: What Goodies Are There?

This is where this edition of Brokeback Mountain comes up painfully short. The four included featurettes are thin at best. Three are simple interview-driven EPK-worthy endeavors and the fourth is a thin-as- paper Logo Television making-of half-hour piece. For a film with the kind of reputation Brokeback has, one would expect there would be countless areas from which to draw to enhance this DVD. No dice.

I’ll wager big money that a more impressive special edition will be released by Christmas.