Brokeback Mountain

Ealasaid/ December 19, 2005/ Movie Reviews and Features

Directed by: Ang Lee
Starring: Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal,
Rated: R for sexuality, nudity, language and some violence.
Parental Notes: This film is a sensitive but brutally honest look at the difficulties of homosexual love in the 60s and 70s. The sex scenes and violence are no more explicit than those in most R-rated films, but they are very emotionally affecting. This is a film aimed at adults, but mature teens may find it well worth watching.

Ang Lee has made a collection of stunningly beautiful and often deeply moving films. He’s as adept at creating humor (“Sense and Sensibility,” “The Wedding Banquet”) as sorrow (“Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” “The Ice Storm”). With his new film, “Brokeback Mountain” he is in full-on tragic form, and this story of love between two cowboys is so well-crafted that its inevitable unhappy ending is horribly wrenching.
The film opens in Wyoming, in 1963. It’s a quiet-feeling place, full of open sky and run-down buildings. Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) both show up at the same foreman’s office looking for work. They’re given jobs looking after hundreds of sheep up on Brokeback Mountain with orders that one of them is to stay in the Forest Service-approved campsite while the other sleeps in an illegal pup tent up near the sheep. They take the jobs, and are soon up on the mountain surrounded by sheep. Lee has a fine eye for natural beauty, and the landscape of the film is stunningly beautiful. He also knows better than to tell us what to think of it all with overbearing background music, and keeps that to a minimum.
Jack and Ennis are two very different men — Ennis is quiet and reserved while Jack is boisterous and energetic. However, the pair soon develop a deep friendship, and that friendship explodes into a sexual affair one cold night when they both stay in the lower camp. All alone up on the mountain, they think they can have “this thing,” as Ennis calls it, without complications. And indeed, the film is devoid of long relationship talks or even much in the way of pillow talk. They show their affection in the way they roughhouse together, and their passion comes through in the handful of physical love scenes scattered through the film. More importantly, Gyllenhaal and Ledger are able to show it in the way the men behave around each other and around the other people in their lives.
While they’re relaxed and happy together, they’re much more grim and serious (particularly Ennis) when they go back to the outside world. Jack has dreams of the two of them buying a ranch somewhere and living happily ever after, but Ennis squashes that notion early on. He knows from firsthand experience as a child just how intolerant the world of rural 60s America can be of men like them, and he has no intention of winding up beaten to death in a ditch somewhere. They both get married, Ennis to the quiet housewife Alma (Michelle Williams) and Jack to the rodeo girl Lureen (Anne Hathaway). They have children, and try to put fulfilling lives together.
But they can’t stay away from each other. Soon they’re taking “fishing trips” together away from their families, trying to keep their relationship secret. It takes a toll over the years. Ennis hardens as he tries to reconcile the way he was raised with his overwhelming love for Jack. He’s not much of a talker, and one gets the feeling that he’s not much of a thinker either; he lives instinctively and now his instincts conflict with one another. Meanwhile Jack becomes a salesman for his father-in-law’s tractor company and takes occasional secretive trips down to Mexico, where the rent boys tide him over during the long waits between trips to see Ennis.
By the time the men are middle-aged, their lives are twisted by their relationship. Although I won’t spoil the ending, I will say that Lee respects the subject matter and the original story enough not to try and make a happy ending out of a homosexual relationship in a time when two men in love were breaking the law and in danger of vigilante justice. What makes it all the more wrenching is that Jack and Ennis win our compassion and sympathy. Lee, Gyllenhaal, and Ledger have created them so fully and fearlessly that it is impossible not to feel the torture of their situation.
“Brokeback Mountain” is a wonderful film, and shows that Lee is back in fine form after the mish-mash that was “Hulk”. This is the story of a love driven into hiding by the disapproval of others, and the terrible effects on not just the lovers but all those around them. It’s not an easy film to watch, at times, and it shouldn’t be. Ang Lee has created a beautiful, wrenching film that will haunt you long after you’ve left the theater.
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