Word: proulx
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CHALLENGES: The film had the opposite problem of most adaptations. It had to expand an 11-page short story to feature length. The screenwriters filled out the relationships of the cowboy lovers with their wives and families. The rest author Annie Proulx made easy; much of her dialogue is included verbatim in the script...
...BOOK WAS BETTER: Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar were really rather dull fellows, and their family lives, when they were in the movie's flatlands (which was most of the time), were drearily miserable in predictable ways. Proulx merely touched contrastingly on that quotidian aspect of their existence and kept the focus on their increasingly tormented romance...
...MOVIE IS BETTER: Proulx was a realist, not much interested in the glories of mountain landscapes. Director Ang Lee is a romantic, and his realizations of the high country where the cowboys herd sheep and fall in love have a transformative effect on the story. He makes you believe those rough, crude guys might just possibly achieve passion and tenderness in those breathtaking locales...
DEFINITIVE VERSION: Proulx's economical epic. Her unforced, almost taciturn manner better communicated the notion that tragedy is not the sole province of the self-conscious. It can devastate the dim and inarticulate as well...
...movie becomes more and more episodic as the years wear on, losing intensity and conviction in the process and betraying the passionate romanticism of its beginnings. Since it was written (from a story by Annie Proulx) by Larry McMurtry and his partner, Diana Ossana, it focuses, as some of his fiction does, on the modern, anti-romantic West, a place of trailer parks and honky-tonks, of small, thwarted hopes, wrangling wranglers and sweet dreams betrayed by raw reality. That sense of place is true to life, one imagines, but it has a dwindling effect on this well-acted...