Brokeback Mountain
(Ang Lee, US)

By Jason McBride

Not since Taylor Mead did the Lupe Velez twist in Warhol’s Lonesome Cowboys (1969) has there been a western as queer as Brokeback Mountain. That it should come out of an indiewood studio, be directed by Ang Lee and star two of Hollywood’s hottest heartthrobs, Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger, is all the more surprising. No American male actors have ever swapped spit with such unbridled vigour. It’s something to behold and will only bolster the bisexual rumours that currently swarm around Gyllenhaal. (One such rumour: Kirsten Dunst notwithstanding, the actor is planning to officially come out as soon as the movie does.) As a film it’s not overly remarkable, but as a riposte to red state-rs and horse-opera purists alike it’s gutsy, tasteful, and moving. And it might just be the first pro-gay marriage movie to open wide.

Adapted by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, from the overripe Annie Proulx story of the same name (published in the New Yorker in 1997), Brokeback Mountain details the improbable romance between a ranch-hand, Ennis Del Mar (Ledger), and a rodeo cowboy, Jack Twist (Gyllenhaal), who meet one day in 1963 when they’re both hired as sheepherders on the titular Wyoming mountain. While both characters fancy themselves hard-nosed cowboys, taking care of a flock of sheep is a far cry from managing a cattle drive, and there’s something comical (and tellingly effeminate) about the work. There are no rustlers, no Navajo hordes. Far-off hillsides teem with sheep that often look like larvae, or swimming sperm. The setting is majestic—Rodrigo Prieto’s camerawork is suitably awestruck—and the worst the men have to contend with is an early snowfall and curious coyotes.

From the get-go, the two man-boys, the taciturn Ennis, and the cocksure, exuberant Jack, sense something in the other. Lee’s economical, slyly sexy staging of their initial parking lot cruise—Gyllenhaal gawks at Ledger as he shaves in his truck’s rear-view mirror—is like Zane Grey filmed by Genet. The men ascend Brokeback, one assigned to sleeping with the sheep, the other ferrying supplies. Boredom sets in, and Ennis and Jack soon forego their responsibilities in favour of a blossoming friendship. Things get domestic: Jack does the cooking while Ennis tends the sheep. Eventually, the whiskey breaks out, and the pants come off. Lee’s no Derek Jarman, however, and, while the sex is aggressive, it’s not overly explicit. “I ain’t queer,” Ennis says. “Me neither,” Jack replies, but both are powerless before their attraction to each other. The relationship becomes more playful and tender, and when the two part ways at the end of the summer—they get fired when their boss (Randy Quaid) catches them “stemming the rose”—both men are crushed.

Ennis takes a wife and continues to eke out a living as a dirt-poor ranch hand while Jack marries money (Anne Hathaway, in an increasingly hideous set of Barbara Mandrell-style wigs). But neither are the marrying kind really, and, when Ennis and Jack meet up four years later, their reunion is teary-eyed and reckless. They quickly repair to a motel, although not before Ennis’s wife, Alma (Michelle Williams), glimpses them locking lips. The pattern continues for the next two decades, both men meeting up several times a year and heading back to Brokeback, these “fishing trips” deepening their bond while destroying their marriages. (Lee designs his interiors for maximum Edward Hopperseque desolation, while the scenes on Brokeback burst with life.) Jack, for his part, yearns to settle down with Ennis on a ranch of their own, but the more clear-eyed Ennis refuses, recalling a scarring (and all-too pointed) childhood moment when his father showed him the mutilated corpse of a notorious catamite. Frustrated and anguished, all the two men can do is mourn the lives they could have had.

Gay filmmakers like Todd Haynes, Kimberly Pierce, and Gus Van Sant have reportedly been attached to the project at various times. There is a whiff of My Own Private Idaho in the cozy campfire scenes, and, as a colleague whispered to me during the screening, why isn’t Bruce Weber making this movie? But the straighter (in every sense) Lee inhabits the milieu with the degree of thorough seriousness for which he’s famous. Perhaps too serious. Formally, Lee is much more attuned to Ennis’s stolid, tight-lipped temperament, and the film, for all of its admirable taboo-busting, goes for earnest when it should be striving for elegiac. McMurtry does the latter well, but mistakenly equates the men’s doomed romance with the more-familiar and closer-to-his-heart mourning of the lost west. Like all of Lee’s work, Brokeback Mountain is entirely competent and workmanlike. But it’s also vaguely compromised, too eager to please, as if Lee felt he had to treat his subject with enough gravity so as not to offend gay audiences (no Riders of the Lavender Sage jokes here). Conversely, he’s a little too cautious, tempering the sex so as not to put off straight ones. Finally though, the current of sadness that runs through the film overcomes this tentativeness. A penultimate scene when Ennis visits Jack’s aged parents—glassy-eyed, stunted, isolated—is oppressive and precise in its depiction of each character’s crushed hopes. As an expression of heartbreak it feels entirely heartfelt, sentiment that’s universally understood.

—Jason McBride

Articles in this Section

Land of the Dead
(George A. Romero, Canada/France/US)
By Michael Sicinski

The Troubles We’ve Seen:
A History of Journalism in Wartime
(Marcel Ophuls, France/Germany/UK)
By Jerry White

Brokeback Mountain
By Jason McBride

War of the Worlds (Steven Spielberg, US)
By Adam Nayma

Darwin’s Nightmare
(Hubert Sauper, Austria/France/Belgium)
By Steve Erickson

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by Jason Anderson

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