Brokeback Mountain
by Catherine Lee

Fresh from winning four Golden Globes, including Best Picture (Drama), Brokeback Mountain came riding onto an additional 500 screens nationwide last week, and that included one screen at each of the multiplexes here in Fort Wayne. Few movies can live up to the kind of rapturous hype and endless media chatter Brokeback Mountain has received. All that noise changes the viewing experience. Brokeback Mountain wasn’t what I expected, but the experience of seeing it wasn’t ruined by that noise either.

I know I’m contributing to that noise as I type. So, if you haven’t seen the “gay cowboy” movie, and you aren’t a victim of the hype that suggests viewing such a film might somehow destroy society or undermine your heterosexuality, I would recommend heading out to see Brokeback Mountain and skipping all other mention of the movie ‘til you’ve seen it.

I spent some time surfing the Google listings for the film, and it is astounding how much yapping there is out there. It’s exhausing to contemplate, and it reinforces the most compelling thing about Brokeback Mountain for me. (I’m no homophobe, so the sexuality in Brokeback Mountain isn’t shocking.)

What knocked me out most about Brokeback Mountain is the way it demonstrates how the world has been made so much smaller in the last forty years. And how easy it is to feel nostalgia for those simpler times, even when you know those “simpler” times included a lot of misery and bigotry for anyone who wasn’t a white male. Brokeback Mountain emphasizes this by showing us two white men who couldn’t make their membership in the white man club an easy fit.

Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) meet in the middle of nowhere, Wyoming, in 1963. Both are very poor and looking for work. No Internet. No cell phones. They get a summer job herding sheep together on horseback. I’m only guessing, but I’ll bet there’s a lot less work for shepherds on horseback in 2006. The world is a profoundly different place 40 years later.

The scene where Jack and Ennis meet is more shocking than any physical contact they have in the film. As the two men check each other out in their Western gear, peaking out from under their hats, sticking close to their pickup trucks, Ang Lee turns the scene into Red River meets a Bruce Weber photo shoot. Cowboys have been gay icons since the Village People and before, but Lee appropriates the iconography very effectively. I was chuckling to myself, the scene was so coy. We know they are gay before they know they are gay.

Ennis and Jack head off to Brokeback, and though the work isn’t easy, the scenery is breathtaking. Brokeback Mountain, like so many movies these days, was shot in Canada because it is cheaper. Ah, outsourcing! But Lee and his gifted cinematographer, Rodrigo Prieto, leave you in no doubt that the mountain is Eden, U.S.A.

But, this Eden is dangergous. Ennis and Jack face those dangers. They come to trust each other. They become friends. One cold night, that bond becomes much more intimate. The next day, very unconvincingly, they claim they aren’t “queer.” At the end of the summer they go their separate ways with the attitude of “What happens on Brokeback, stays on Brokeback.”

Ennis marries his sweetheart Alma, and they live a rather hardscrabble existence in Wyoming. Jack, while working in rodeos in Texas, meets and marries Lureen, a rodeo cowgirl from a family with a thriving farm equipment business.

Over the next 20 years or so, Jack and Ennis communicate by sending very occasional postcards to each other and meeting to “go fishing.” During this time, the two men lead very different lives. Neither felt much comfort growing up, and in different ways their discomforts follow them through adulthood.

Ennis has a very big, very real fear of what happens to “queers.” He’s a much more taciturn and stoic type. Alma, played with mournful resentment by Michele Williams, sees him kissing Jack with passion and delight, and, in perfectly repressed fashion, never mentions it. Eventually, they divorce, and Ennis stays involved in his daughters’ lives.

Jack’s home life offers more material comforts, but it is no picnic. He’s got a jerk of a father-in-law, but in one very concise scene, the way Jack stands up to the guy suggests all you need to know about why Lureen might stay in a less than ideal marriage.

Lureen is played by Anne Hathaway. Jack and Lureen’s life together isn’t given much convincing emotional reality. Lureen’s discomfort is a collection of details. She wears more jewelry. Her hair gets more ridiculous as time passes, and she spends more time at the adding machine. Hathaway is given the only true come-on line in the movie, “Hey, cowboy, what are you waiting for, a mating call?” she says to Jack. And, talking to Ennis over the phone towards the end of the movie, she shows how Lureen has loved and suffered with Jack.

Brokeback Mountain feels lopsided in its portrayal of the two men. Jack dreams that he and Ennis could ranch together. He imagines a world where they would be together. He pursues other men, and is pursued by other men. But, though the movie comes forward in time to a place where homophobia isn’t so pervasive, we don’t get much of a sense of how the changes in the world are changing Jack.

The story imbalance is either caused or enhanced, or a little bit of both, by the performance of Heath Ledger. He makes Ennis believable and terribly sympathetic. In contrast, Gyllenhaal’s performance feels more superficial. The moustache he grows as time passes doesn’t help.

Brokeback Mountain is a grim testament to how destructive the pervasive irrational fear of homosexuality damages the lives of men and women. One self-styled Christian viewpoint I found in my net surfing angrily described the film as “a very positive portrayal of a lifestyle.” Only a deeply delusional, fearful and hateful view of homosexuality could characterize Brokeback Mountain as “positive.” The movie is sympathetic to the suffering. That’s very different than “positive.”

Ennis and his daugther Alma junior share real love, and I’m sure the genuineness of their bond scares the fearful as much as anything in the movie. Ennis, much more than Jack, cannot be reduced to a man making a lifestlye choice.

Catherine Lee is the executive director of Fort Wayne Cinema Center, the only independently operated movie theater in Fort Wayne, specializing in independent, foreign, documentary, specialty and classic films.

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