WhatzUp

Brokeback Mountain
by Derek Neff

I’m not going to write about the Oscar controversy surrounding Brokeback Mountain. I’m not going to discuss the way the film has been politicized by both the left and the right. I won’t join the late night talk show hosts who have made so much comedic hay over the “gay cowboy” movie. None of these people seem to be referring to the same movie I saw. The film I saw is an immensely beautiful and sad epic love story that explores the consequences of life choices, self-denial, fear and what it means to be a man in American society.

These are large issues, to be sure, but the movie is up to the task. Director Ang Lee and screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana have crafted an expansive, realistic and never less than gripping period piece that, for its quiet elegance and subtle psychological astuteness, is unmatched by any film I’ve seen since 2001’s In the Bedroom.

Brokeback opens in 1963 in rural Wyoming, a rigidly codified time and place where, if you’re a man, you don’t talk much and you wouldn’t be caught dead showing your feelings around others. At first glance both Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) fit right into this world. The two are hired to watch after a large herd of sheep for the summer near Brokeback Mountain, way out in the middle of nowhere.

During the summer Ennis cracks on Jack’s poor harmonica playing, Jack complains about the beans Ennis cooks and the two become as close as two men are permitted by society. They drink together in silence, occasionally sharing tidbits about their stoic upbringings; and then one night after the two have drank too much, Jack and Ennis find themselves alone together in the tent with the thing they’ve been denying for weeks. The thing that would get them killed if too many people found out about. And then it finally happens. The two agree this affair is to be a “one-shot deal,” and at the end of the summer the two say goodbye as if separating were easy.

Several years pass. Ennis gets married to and has children with his longtime sweetheart Alma (Michelle Williams), while Jack resumes his mediocre rodeo career where he meets his wife-to-be Lureen (Anne Hathaway).

And then Ennis gets a postcard from Jack. “I’ll be driving through the area soon, would you like to get together?” At this point the one-time-only fling turns into a decades-long secret affair.

It would seem that the relationship means more to Jack than Ennis. Jack is the one who makes all the arrangements; Jack is the one who drives 12 hours each way to be with Ennis; and Jack is the one who dreams that they might one day buy their own ranch and live together. Jack is a dreamer, a prolific philanderer (with both men and women) and a failure in nearly every way. He is also admirably passionate and willing to give up everything for Ennis.

Ennis, on the other hand, is so paralyzed by his own fears that he manages to slowly ruin everything. Ennis is a tragic figure, and, as Ennis, Ledger delivers one of the most subtle, laconic and poignant performances I’ve ever seen on film. Ennis is never the calcified, defeated, “strong silent type” he would like everyone to think he is. Ledger’s performance reveals beneath the stillness, beneath the stoicism, a quicksilver aliveness that is never completely extinguished.

Like Brando before him, Ledger has the unique talent of indelibly infusing his roles with his own personal touch, thereby strengthening both the role and the movie in the process.

Director Lee (who has made a career out of adapting distinguished works of fiction like The Ice Storm, Sense and Sensibility, and, um, The Incredible Hulk) has assembled a superlative cast, an extraordinarily talented team of great screenwriters and a great art director (Laura Ballinger).

Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto’s frequently astonishing imagery contains not just the boilerplate “gee-whiz” landscape shots you’d expect in a movie shot in the Wyoming high country (Jack playing the harmonica in the foreground while in the distant background a bolt of lightning erupts; Ennis punching and kicking a man while fireworks explode above him) but unforgettable “mundane” imagery such as Alma sitting at her formica dining table with a cup of coffee while the sun comes in the window, or Jack catching a furtive glimpse of Ennis through the rear-view mirror of his dusty pickup truck.

It doesn’t hurt that, like the aforementioned In the Bedroom, Brokeback is based on a short story. This may be a coincidence or it may strongly indicate that a short story can more fruitfully be adapted into a movie than a novel. (How many movies, after all, are as good as the novels from which they’ve been adapted?) Screenwriters Ossana and McMurtry (a great fiction writer in his own right) have the unique opportunity to expand on the primary source, an opportunity they don’t squander. The movie contains scenes and characters which aren’t in Proulx’s story at all, but which contribute greatly to the overall effect.

I can’t address the reluctance or discomfort that some people might experience while watching Brokeback Mountain, or some of the political back-and-forthing that has arisen as a result. Brokeback will outlast all of the extraneous baggage that’s currently attached to it. In my estimation, it is one of the all-time great love stories.