Brokeback Mountain
Movie Review
"Brokeback Mountain"
Review by Eric D. Snider
Grade: A
Rating: R
Released: Friday, December 9, 2005
Directed by:
Cast:
"Brokeback Mountain" is the story of two people who fall in love with the person they least expected to. In that regard, it is no different from hundreds of other movies about mismatched couples and surprise romances. That the romance is doomed and tragic is not particularly uncommon, either. That it involves two men ... OK, now we're into somewhat less familiar territory. That it's all of those things, plus powerful and moving enough to be one of the best films of the year, is extraordinary.
Ang Lee's poetic, beautifully rendered version of E. Annie Proulx's short story (adapted by "Lonesome Dove's" Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana) is elegant to behold and poignant to contemplate. It's a mournful love story, fraught with unexpressed emotions, sad realities and terrible losses. But when I think about the movie, I smile. The story is told so masterfully, and the emotions evoked so completely, that I'm more overcome by what a good film it is than by how "sad" certain elements of it might be. Plus, there's that final scene, which is so sweet and disarmingly tender....
It is 1963 when Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) meet in Signal, Wyo. The two cowboys are hired by a rancher named Aguirre (Randy Quaid) to take care of his sheep up on Brokeback Mountain for the summer. This puts them in isolation for three months, no human but themselves around for miles.
Ennis is taciturn and stoic, the quintessential Marlboro Man cowboy, down to his guttural voice and squinty eyes. Jack is slightly more talkative and showy, having been a rodeo rider before he came to Wyoming. When Ennis tells Jack a story about his past, Jack says, "That's more words than you've spoken in the last two weeks." Ennis, not given to introspection but here realizing something about himself, smiles and says, "That's more words than I've spoken in the last two years."
It's on a cold night in the tent that it happens. Jack is the instigator, but Ennis does not resist for more than a moment. They have fallen recklessly and violently -- improbably and hopelessly -- in love.
Yet the word "love" is not used. Neither, for that matter, is the word "sex," not until very late in the film (and then it's a synonym). As their relationship continues over the next two decades, parted by geography and their separate marriages and reunited a few times a year for "fishing trips," all they ever call it is "this thing." It IS love, and there is sex involved, but those aren't the words they use to describe it. It's simply "this thing."
What's notable about "Brokeback Mountain" is what's NOT in it. Despite its reputation as a "gay cowboy" movie, there is but one sex scene between the two men, and it occurs fully clothed. Meanwhile, there are three boy-girl sex scenes, and altogether more female nudity than male.
There are also no sociopolitical messages. If the film is nothing more than propaganda for the "gay agenda," as some have suggested, you'd expect there to be speeches where Ennis and Jack decry the current state of affairs and wistfully long for a day when they'll be accepted in society. Yet there's nothing of the kind. Quite the opposite, actually. They acknowledge that if they were to run off together, their living arrangement would be socially unwise and even physically dangerous, and neither of them says that things "ought" to be otherwise. They're cowboys, after all, given to stoicism, not fantasizing or activism. "If you can't fix it, you gotta stand it," Ennis says, his point being that this particular situation cannot be fixed.
The two women in the film are Michelle Williams as Ennis' wife Alma and Anne Hathaway as Jack's wife Lureen. They never meet each other. Jack and Ennis only communicate via postcard, just enough for Jack to say, "Fishing trip in three weeks?" and Ennis to reply, "Sure." Alma is suspicious of the arrangement but terrified to investigate it. Lureen is content to run rough-shod over her husband -- she's a rodeo-rider too -- and to let her austere father do the same.
Gyllenhaal's and Ledger's performances are both subtly brilliant. Neither man's character says much, so they make what dialogue there is rife with import. Body language and facial expressions speak volumes, too, particularly in the way they interact with each other. You can tell by watching them together what their backgrounds are and what roles they play in the relationship: Jack can't please his father, has longings he can't understand, and wishes he had someone he could talk to about it; Ennis is fiercely independent, doesn't brood over his feelings, and often seems "above" the whole sloppy notion of being in love even though he is in fact very deeply in love.
Like all great films, this one finds universal themes in an unusual and specific story. Anyone who has been in love will see himself or herself in Jack or Ennis. Their story has many of the conventions of a typical troubled-relationship movie, translated into the language of two cowboys who are at a loss to explain what has happened to them.
Grade: A
Rated R, a lot of harsh profanity, a few scenes of strong sexuality, a little violence
2 hrs., 14 min.
Copyright © Eric D. Snider.
This work may not be transmitted via the Internet, nor reproduced in any other way, without written consent from Eric D. Snider.
This item has 10 comments
June 14, 2007 at 6:14 pm
How can a film this excellent have no comments until now, over a year and a half since its release? Either those who saw it did not enjoy it (which I doubt is the case), or even those who saw it and enjoyed it are reluctant to say they enjoyed it. The initial get-together scene struck me as unrealistic because I would have expected the growing-love process - regardless of the two being the same sex - to be similar to K Hepburn falling in love with Humphrey Bogart in African Queen. Anyway, I found the story to be poignant and heart-wrenching.
June 14, 2007 at 10:37 pm
A lot of good movies don't have any comments. The comments are a relatively recent addition to this website and most people don't really go back to comment on movies that have been on DVD for a year already. I think there was quite a discussion about this movie on the forums at the time of its release.
June 15, 2007 at 2:35 pm
No comments on this film because it didn't live up to all the hype it got from the press.
My main criticism of the movie is there was absolutely no indication that either one of these guys had the 'hots' for one another and that's what the whole premise is based on.
So when these two guy jumped on each other in the tent, it made no damn sense at all. The photography was good but that was about it.
Sorry Eric missed this point.
June 16, 2007 at 3:21 pm
Sorry, Cedar, did you say ERIC missed the point? You stated, that the whole premise of the movie was that these guys had the hots for each other, and that when they jumped on each other in the tent, it made no damn sense at all.
Could it be that you, like many emotionally immature people, confuse LOVE with SEX? Therefore, in your view, a LOVE STORY equals a MOVIE SHOWING GRAPHIC SEX, this time between two males?
I'm sure if what you were looking for was a gay porn movie, you can find someone old enough to rent one for you.
But I agree with you about the photography. It, like the story of the LOVE between these two people, was beautiful.
July 16, 2007 at 4:18 pm
I think Cedar's comments have merit. Moreover, KS is unfair to brand a person as "emotionally immature" simply because he expects to see some indication that one person is attracted to another before any sexual activity occurs between the two. If, on one hand, you had seen Humphrey and Hepburn (or any other hetersexual couple) treat each other without a trace of romantic interest or admiration, and then, on the other hand, the two fall into a deep, intimate kiss as one is drawing water and the other is preparing food, the objective viewer couldn't help saying, "Did I miss somthing? Where was the slightest hint that either person admired or was otherwise attracted to the other?" Watch Fred McMurray and the lead woman fall in love in "Follow Me Boy!" and you are emotionally and mentally prepared to see a logical increase in their emotional intimacy when it ultimately blossoms into a tender, warm, loving kiss. Such a logical foundation was absolutely absent in Brokeback Mountain, and that is why the tent scene struck me as wholly artificial, and why I understand Cedar's surprise. Nevertheless, I agree that one can be sexually attracted to another without any feelings of love. In Brokeback Mountain or any hetersexual scene, however, I gotta see some degree of sexual interest before I am prepared to see an expression of sexual activity. And KS, where did the "gay porn movie" statement come from? It struck me as a nonsequitur at best, and a cheap shot at best, which is probably how you meant it because you intimate that Cedar is a child when you suggest he find someone old enough to rent a porno flick for him. I'll go out on a limb and suggest that your caustic comments indicate some repressed anger at people who don't share your views about the propriety of same-sex attraction.
July 16, 2007 at 4:27 pm
Whoops! As the reader may know, I meant to say ". . . a cheap shot at worst. . . "
July 18, 2007 at 5:24 pm
Fellow Viewers: Please overlook my last sentence at No. Five as inappropriate.
January 29, 2008 at 11:39 am
i fell in love with this movie, its heart wrenching and although its about two male cowboys having an affair, the story is amazing, and ledger and gyllenhaal provide so much depth to the movie, and their preformances amaze me.
question:
1. were the sex scenes really them having sex, or was it fake?
someone who REALLY knows please answer in another comment.
July 26, 2008 at 5:40 pm
I was out of the country when this film premiered and just watched it last week (July 2008). What a pleasant surprise. Heath Ledger was very believable -- he acted with restraint and emotional poignancy. Jake, however, seemed to be K.D. Lang in drag. The film, for me, disrupts socially constructed norms of gender and heterosexuality. If there was a loosening or absence of hegemonic rules of gender norms, who would you fall in love with?
December 5, 2008 at 10:53 pm
What is sad is my boyfriend won't watch it because he was told that there was graphic male on male sex. This movie had the least flesh of any movie that has sex that I have seen in a long while. I have to say I wish ALL movies would be this discrete yet obvious about the sex.