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Brokeback Mountain
(2005)
The romance genre has always depended on cruel obstacles. Romeo and Juliet, Wuthering Heights, Casablanca. But Hollywood has pretty much lost its imagination when it comes to romance, settling for moribund disease-of-the-week weepies and unfunny romantic "comedies." With Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee paints an epic romance that's long overdue: one between two men. As in the great stories to proceed it, Brokeback Mountain's heroes must overcome a hostile society to share their love, and it ain't gonna be easy.
The story—adapted by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana from E. Annie Proulx's much-heralded short story—is deceptively simple: two ranchhands in 1963 Wyoming find each other when they both land a sheepherding job in the remote wild of Brokeback Mountain. Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) is taciturn and gruff; Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), formerly of the rodeo circuit, bursts with loose-cannon energy. With all the time in the world, the two men begin to share their experiences: Ennis discovers he doesn't mind listening to Jack, or even talking to him.
One bitterly cold night, the men wind up huddled in the same small tent, where they wordlessly grapple each other in an act of fierce passion. What Ennis hastens to call a "one-shot thing" becomes a season of love, but before long the job ends, and the men awkwardly go their separate ways. In frustration, both men try paths of least resistance—repression and marriage—but the flame won't go out. Over the decades, Ennis and Jack meet for "fishing trips" that allow trysts and dead-end considerations of how to improve their lot in life: Jack suggests that they get a ranch of their own; Ennis has good reason to doubt that two men can make a life together in America's "heartland."
Lee masterfully keeps his viewers hanging on every frame with closely observed storytelling and life-like rhythms. McMurtry and Ossana's emotionally detailed script makes a great starting point, and Lee powerfully uses Western conventions to visualize the unconventional love story. Big-sky scenery and the iconic imagery of rough-riding, overcast "Marlboro Men" set the stage for Lee's distinctive brand of symbolist drama (is it coincidental that the film begins in Signal, Wyoming?).
While attending to realism, Lee encodes each scene with emotional and thematic subtext. Without a wasted frame, Lee observes the flowering of the relationship between the two men. In one representative shot, Lee places Jack in the foreground, as an unclothed Ennis bathes in the background. Here, it's about what doesn't happen: Jack never turns around (though Lee knows that we know that Jack would like to look). When Jack eventually makes a move on Ennis, we know that it's not a whim—it's an act of courage with an emotional cost. As for symbols, the lonely idyll of Brokeback Mountain is but one of many. Picnicking with his wife (Michelle Williams) and kids, Ennis takes out his frustration on two loudmouth, pussy-seeking jerks. The occasion? Independence Day.
The acting is notable all around. Williams and Anne Hathaway are revelatory as the scorned wives, the former stunned into a tightly-wound repression of her own and the latter gradually soured by her functional but love-deficient marriage. Ennis has married sideways and Jack up—Williams and Hathaway perfectly adapt to their respective milieus (credit Judy Becker for the expert production design). As the homophobic boss-man, Randy Quaid reminds us that he's capable of a delicate performance, and Kate Mara shines in the small but key role of Ennis' grown daughter.
Naturally, Brokeback Mountain belongs to two men. Ledger bottles a wholehearted maelstrom: when he uncaps himself, the Oscars get their clip, but he's equally affecting in the scenes that betray fissures in his surface. Gyllenhaal masters Jack's set of frustrations: he's already been and gone from Ennis's place of self-loathing. With skill and commitment, Gyllenhaal expresses Jack's love and anger, over injustice and his partner's failure of boldness.
The story resolves with a final wave of elegant symbolism and tender feeling that leaves the audience to consider the wages of individual and institutionalized responsibility for human oppression. In a time when gay marriage has become a pressing point, Lee takes a long, hard look at the human element of the last, as-yet-untamed frontier of civil rights. Proulx couldn't know it when she wrote her 1997 story, but Wyoming would be home, one year later, to the lightning-rod cautionary tale of Matthew Shepard, the gay youth beaten, strung up, and left to die by two conflicted young men.
By using classical romantic convention, Lee ironically breaks new ground. Though ostensibly an independent film (coming as it does from Universal's "specialty division" Focus Features), Brokeback Mountain walks and talks like a Hollywood production despite subject matter many will find subversive. Poised on the mainstream with its rising-star leads, first-class director, and Oscar prospects, Brokeback Mountain will play in Peoria, but will it play? One day the point will be moot, but Lee's universal story of elusive love will remain.
[For Groucho's interview with director Ang Lee, click here.]
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