What Stuyvesant SING! needed was gay cowboy sex.

"weirdly unresolved"

Well duh... it's based on a story by E. Annie Proulx, whose writing is always weird and in whose writing nothing is ever resolved.

Yes, but the problem isn't the lack of resolution. An aesthetic representation that lacks resolution is common in naturalistic work--just look at the very successful close of a film like In The Bedroom. It's the intimation of importance, and then the use of stock imagistic shots to allay that intimation that rings so hollow. Even worse, the violence doesn't seem to be dramatically important, that is, central to the film, but just "important" in that feckless Hollywood way, as if Lee wanted to cover all of his bases by touching on the families. By presenting Alma and Lureen as victims of the forces that prevent Jack and Ennis from getting together, rather than victims of Jack and Ennis (or more interestingly as agents, instead of passive vessels [yes, yes - it's not their story, but would it kill Lee to give the wives more than his cool disdain, or to have a female character with emotional depth who wasn't in a filial role?]), and then eliding those forces, the tidal wave of accumulated observation and violence, into the short punctuated scene of Jack's death, imagined by Ennis, and cross-cutting to the sniffling Hathaway, whose every small realization is punctuated with a smaller rupture in her even-keeledness (as if a smaller animal, somewhere inside Hathaway, was ripping its leg out of a trap), Lee manages to say nothing about the relation of their sexual choice to the suffering of their wives. It is not just a lack of resolution, it is a moral vacuousness.