Overall Rating
  Awesome: 62.5%
Worth A Look: 12.95%
Average: 13.39%
Pretty Bad: 4.91%
Total Crap: 6.25%
17 reviews, 122 user ratings
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| Brokeback Mountain |
by PaulBryant
"A landmark film for Hollywood, and its finest love story in years."
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The makers of Brokeback Mountain are an eclectic bunch. Two Pulitzer Prize winners in Larry “Lonesome Dove” McMurtry and Annie “Shipping News” Proulx helped create the screenplay, which was filmed under the direction of Oscar winner Ang “Crouching Tiger” Lee. This is all very impressive, of course, but then there’s the two young bucks in Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger. Relatively fresh and unproven, the two are thrown into these capable hands and more than hold their own in a superb adaptation of Proulx’s short story. The result is a timeless tribute to the power of love that portrays equal amounts pleasure and pain.It begins in classic Western style: two cowboys stand across from each other amidst the whirling Wyoming dust, glancing at the other man beneath the brim of his cowboy hat. In another Western, one scoundrel would pull out a harmonica and set the stage to draw guns; but this isn’t really a Western, and the only guns they’ll end up pulling on each other aren’t Smith and Wesson’s. Jack Twist (Gyllenhaal) has arrived in his beat-up pickup in front Joe Aguirre’s (Randy Quaid) trailer, ready to receive the duties of sheep herding, unprepared that the blonde, broken-in Ennis Del Mar (Ledger) will be his partner for the cold months ahead.
A quick shave, a few longer-than-usual glances, and a suggestive pose, suggest Jack may have designs to ride more than just his horse up on Brokeback. Ledger’s Ennis is distant, gruff; a man of few words and a lot of cigarettes. He speaks like Ben Johnson doing Robert De Niro – low, mythic, but mumbling, wounded. Neither of them says a word as Aguirre belts out that the job is for one guy to stay in the Forest Service campground, while the other is to sleep with the sheep to guard them from coyotes. It’s a pep-talk worthy of any grizzled, just-past-middle-aged gym teacher, and allows the two young men to find a preliminary camaraderie in their detest of the boss. Before I go further, this much should be said about Ledger: from the very first second, he owns the picture, and it will be shocking if he doesn’t win an Oscar.
They trot up the lonely countryside as masculine as cigarette-ads, Jack sleeping with the sheep, Ennis at camp cooking beans over the fire. They spend their nights staring off into the clear sky and distant horizon of what is usually referred to as God’s Country, aching from the hours of riding, with a bottle of hard liquor and a pair of wranglers – about the furthest thing possible from the standard Hollywood homosexual. Sleeping with the sheep is too cold and tiring for Jack – forever prone to bellyache – and Ennis offers to take the shift. Jack agrees, but after one cold night of too much whiskey, Ennis ends up sleeping in the camp tent to avoid frostbite. A need for warmth brings the men close together in the night, and then lust throws them into a bout of drunken, rough-and-tumble sex.
The frantic fuck turns out to be anything but a one-time deal, and they carry on their occasionally violent affair for the duration of the job, each man reminding the other, “I ain’t no queer,” to soothe any qualms that they’ve been knocking spurs with an actual homosexual this whole time. Ennis’s pent up frustration about his itinerant life is palpable. He walks as though a heavy magnet were lodged in his diaphragm, pulling the rest of his body in towards itself. Jack is more open and optimistic. He’s as poor as Ennis, but he’s got plans and dreams for the future that he truly believes will work out. This character difference will plague the cowboys from here on in: Jack thinks he can staunch any problem, Ennis thinks he has to wince and bear the pain. After the job is over, they come to the resolution that they can’t go on with their relationship; a decision neither man really wants. True feelings left undeclared, Jack speeds away in his truck, Ennis walks off slowly, and suddenly they’re apart. Proulx’s story describes their pain perfectly: “Ennis felt like someone was pulling his guts out hand over hand one yard at a time”. He keels over, unable to vomit or stay on his feet, crippled by the love he thinks he’s lost forever.
The two go their separate ways and each marries a woman and starts a family. Ennis becomes the picture of domesticity, and we wonder how much the loss of Jack has actually affected him. Four years after their parting Jack sends Ennis a postcard that prompts them to meet again, and we learn how much of Ennis’ mind still lies in that tent up on Brokeback. He puts on his best shirt and waits anxiously by the window the day Jack is due to arrive from Texas, and when he sees him, finally dispenses with the granite exterior, thrusting himself on Jack, kissing him ferociously. From this reawakening of their passion, the two continue a secret affair of infrequent “fishing trips” up in the mountains. Of course, Jack, always the romantic, thinks they could get enough scratch together for a place of their own, but Ennis, paralyzed by his fear of being “queer” and what could come from that, figures they’re stuck with their “two or three high-altitude fucks” per year. His close-mindedness is just as fatal to their love as the society which doesn’t accept them.
The movie brilliantly shows the dire consequences of Jack and Ennis’ suppressed love, not only on their own lives, but on the lives of their wives and children who feel the cold effects of a burden they don’t even know exists. But it does all this without specifically stating the obvious. When the two are alone together, they don’t strut around the mountainside pontificating like a Jane Austen novel about how and why they can never be lovers in a society that sees their union as an abomination. Instead, all is understood with truthful looks and a few sparse words. Jack says: “It could be like this, just you and me, always.” Ennis – less the dreamer – replies with a story from his childhood about a rancher who was brutally murdered because he lived with another man, fatally summing things up: “if you can’t fix it, you gotta stand it.” His line is what some prudent person could have put on his gravestone, had Ennis let anybody other than Jack know that this was his one and only mantra.
Now, I’ve avoided the obvious “controversy” about the film until this point, mainly because I don’t think – living in my little liberal bubble – there is much controversial about it. In Canada, most of us have gotten past the political babblings about homosexuality, other than some wilting conservatives who pretend the US has things figured out for the greater good. Some would call it a “post-gay” society, where polemic conversations need not be had, so that the experiment with true equality can allowed to show it has more value than Focus on the Family could ever fashion from their no-premarital-sex, gays-can-be-cured-with-Jesus, heterosexist wet dream. But the southern neighbors of this ‘post-gay’ society are still mired in a middle ground, accepting homosexuality exists, not accepting it as worthy of marriage, and attaching its Borg-like Collective Brain to the idea that “gay” denotes a limp-wristed fashion expert with exfoliating products and a fauxhawk.
Brokeback, therefore, has been labelled a “gay cowboy movie” by countless folk. But to see this movie and call it a “gay cowboy” film is to have misunderstood its entire objective. We are stuck in a culture that loves to label things; to call people either gay, bi, trans, queer, etc. But Brokeback Mountain boils down love, orientation, sex, and everything else to its bare essentials. Two souls connect. That is what happens; that is why it’s tragic then they’re forced apart. The movie lets sex and love happen because they happen, not because its characters are genetically predetermined to get aroused by a man or a woman – or some such nonsense. To believe that Brokeback is a “gay cowboy movie”, or a homosexual movie made only for a homosexual audience, is as silly as thinking the demographic for the recently released Pride and Prejudice is only 19th century spoiled English brats.
Ang Lee has directed the film in a style as anti-flamboyant as the two main characters, which is the ideal way to craft McMurty and Diana Ossana’s fine script. He allows the movie to fill the spaces between the words of Proulx’s story, capturing the timeless visual beauty of the western landscape with the aid of Rodrigo Prieto’s photography, and composer Gustavo Santaolalla’s simply perfect love theme. Lee’s film is full of silence, and he relishes in the power silence can give to the photographic image, allowing his camera to become the key to their unannounced feelings. As the two talk in front of a flickering fire about their lives growing up, Lee gives Heath a stretch of dialogue in a long shot and then cuts to a close-up of Jake to show his growing infatuation. Then Ledger is the one to get the close-up and the two go on talking, their unspoken attraction captured by Lee’s camera, virtually subverting the dialogue. Seeing as how the two never bluntly declare their love for each other (though it's obvious Jack's line “I wish I knew how to quit you” should actually read, “I wish I knew how to quit loving you”) this visual nuance makes the rest of the story coherent – especially in justification of Heath’s aggressiveness in the early sex scenes. Further, without giving anything away, Lee’s final image is a shot worthy of John Ford – you won’t soon forget it.So for those living with thick gauze over their eyes and ears, a movie that shows two masculine men kissing, loving, and embracing, may seem controversial. But for the rest of us it is more of an “about time” scenario, and we are glad that one of the fist big Hollywood pictures to treat homosexuality frankly and sophisticatedly is also one of the best of the year.
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link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=12764&reviewer=364
originally posted: 12/10/05 05:17:52
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OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2005 Toronto Film Festival For more in the 2005 Toronto Film Festival series, click here.
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USA
09-Dec-2005 (R)
DVD: 23-Jan-2007
UK
N/A
Australia
26-Jan-2006
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