Focus Features
Starring: Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Anne Hathaway and Randy Quaid
The Verdict: ‘Brokeback Mountain’ shows the true grit of forbidden romance.
3 1/2 of 4 stars
It’s a hard, solitary life for Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal). Jack’s with the herd all day; Ennis washes and cooks at the camp on Brokeback Mountain. They watch the sheep, ward off wolves and bears and eat pot after pot of nothing but beans. Slowly, the men bond in the way that all co-workers do, griping about the boss and eventually opening up with more personal conversation. Alone and rootless in the middle of the wilderness, they depend on each other for everything.
On one very cold night, the men get drunk, share a tent, and, almost without warning, begin to have sex. The next day, the cowboys can’t seem to reconcile what happened. Ennis is quick to say, “I ain’t no queer.” Jack’s even quicker to respond, “Me neither.”
Eventually, the pair must come down from the mountain when the job is over. Jack has rodeos to ride, and Ennis is engaged to be married to his best girl, the mousy Alma (Michelle Williams). Jack is still starry-eyed and hopeful that he and Ennis can be together, maybe get their own ranch someday.
Ennis knows better.
Since childhood he’s been taught that abnormality is wrong and should be punished. He recounts the lynching of a homosexual who lived near him when he was a boy. Though Ennis hadn’t even reached his teens, his father proudly showed him the man’s mutilated corpse. It was a ghoulish sign that difference would not be tolerated by the men of that area. Ennis wonders, even now, if his father was one of the murderers.
Several years after their original encounter, Jack shoots Ennis a postcard and suggests they reunite for a “fishing trip.” When Jack arrives on his doorstep, Ennis surprises both of them with the passion of his reaction; he grabs his friend, pushes him into a wall, and kisses him without thinking who might be watching. As it turns out, Alma is watching from an upstairs window, mouth agape as she sees her future with her husband crumble before her eyes.
One of the tragedies at the core of the great new film “Brokeback Mountain” is that, despite his feelings for Jack, Ennis would rather stay alive and live a socially acceptable lie than flirt with his own mortality by following his heart. He’s seen firsthand that he cannot afford to be idealistic or optimistic about his sexuality, so he represses it. He’s a man at war with his own nature, twisted inside and shut-off, apologetic on the surface.
Heath Ledger is remarkable as Ennis. The actor’s face is a mask of hidden contempt at the life he’s forced to lead, his lips always frozen, barely opening when drawling out a line. His shoulders slump, and he walks and speaks with his head lowered like he’s crippled by shame or fear and could implode on himself at any moment. His movements are awkward, his eyes plaintive. He’s a man completely uncomfortable in his own skin. Ledger’s performance is raw and emotionally powerful, never begging for sympathy, yet never failing to arouse it in triplicate.
The film refuses to overplay even its most heated moments of roiling melodrama. Director Ang Lee keeps the big emotions bottled up and lets them slip through slowly, so they hit you when you’re off your guard.
Lee’s pacing is masterful. He embraces the slow, steady gait of the traditional American Western and some of the well-worn, larger-than-life mythos of that genre, yet the genius of his direction is the unshowy way in which he subverts the macho old cowboy archetypes into something more unexpected and profound.
“Brokeback Mountain” is also a visual triumph for Lee, who wisely lets images do much of the talking in the film. His shots tell the story and reinforce its themes.
Ennis and his family are at a public July 4 picnic when two rowdy bikers crash the event, cursing loudly and making inappropriate comments in hearing distance of Ennis’s children. He tells them to shut up, and when they don’t he gets furious, kicks them and threatens to kill them. The end of the fight is shot from the ground up, with Ledger looming like a giant in the foreground with his family cowering in the distance and fireworks bursting in the sky behind him. Lee takes the most American of holidays and the uniquely American icon of the strong, silent cowboy and wrings something poetic and intensely ironic out of them, all without so much as a spoken word.
Based on E. Annie Proulx’s short story, “Brokeback Mountain” was co-written for the screen by Diana Ossanna and famed novelist Larry McMurtry, who channels the spirit of the dying Old West, perhaps better than any other modern Western scribe. The dialogue is spare and hauntingly lyrical.
Also indispensable are cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto and composer Gustavo Santaolalla, whose deceptively bare score gets under your skin and twangs away sorrowfully in your head.
Jake Gyllenhaal is the weakest link in a strong supporting cast, with Michelle Williams a standout as the mousy, increasingly mortified Alma, and Randy Quaid appropriately off-putting as harbinger-of-doom Aguirre. Anne Hathaway is good, too, in the small role of Jack’s wealthy wife, but neither she nor Gyllenhaal can pull off the decades worth of aging required for their character arcs.
Jack isn’t as compelling or well-defined a character as Ennis, and Gyllenhaal can’t smooth out his rough edges. He feels a little too much like an actor reading lines and playing dress-up.
Most criticism lobbed at the film has come from outspoken voices who object to “Brokeback Mountain” on moral grounds, but that’s more a swipe at its subject matter than at the quality of the film itself. Some have derided the film as overly celebratory of homosexuality, and others have denounced it as anti-marriage.
It’s the homosexuality of the main characters, after all, that leads to the disintegration of both of their families and the unhappiness of about every character in the film. And the movie only slams marriages that exist as empty vessels for keeping up appearances, loveless unions for the sake of upping the population and keeping up with the Joneses. What’s so devious about that?
This critic’s only gripe about the film is that it cannot quite live up to its monumental hype or to the expectations aroused by the media firestorm it has ignited. Hype is the murderer of innocent discovery and unbiased opinion. The most crucial plot twist has been known to the public for months. Because everyone knows “Brokeback Mountain” as the “gay cowboy movie,” audience members are likely to spend the first 45 minutes of the film nervously fidgeting around and waiting for the two male stars to kiss.
Some have called the film “revolutionary.” At first, this seems a gross overstatement. The controversial onscreen content is minimal-one very brief and dimly-lit sex scene and few stolen kisses. Upon second thought, however, one realizes that “Brokeback” is revolutionary in its delivery. The film neither congratulates nor spews hatred at its characters for being gay; that’s simply the way they are.
The film realizes, but does not comment upon, the fact that the climate of American culture hasn’t changed much in the last 40 years. The union of Jack and Ennis would still be controversial today, in Wyoming or in Manhattan.
“Brokeback Mountain” wants to start conversations, not claim to end them. It does so gracefully, artfully and memorably.