Gay cowboys search for identities in ‘Brokenback Mountain’
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Here’s another one: overrated.
Yes, it is a gorgeous film, filled with excellent performances from a beautifully chosen cast. It’s big and weepy, dripping with love and loss, set over 20 years against a backdrop of wide-open Wyoming skies.
The behind-the-scenes team is top notch and highly decorated: Ang Lee is the director, working from a script by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, based on a short story by Annie Proulx; Rodrigo Prieto serves as cinematographer. It will surely be an Oscar nominee many times over.
Yet all the hype seems to spring from the perceived shock factor of its subject matter. “Brokeback Mountain” is, in simplest terms, a gay Western: the story of two cowboys who form a deep physical and emotional bond during the summer of 1963, a time when it wasn’t exactly OK to be out. (Not that being gay in Wyoming has gotten much easier.)
Six years after his more traditional (and less acclaimed) Western “Ride With the Devil,” Lee turns the genre on its head ? or flips it onto its belly, take your pick. But there’s something episodic about the film’s structure, especially after the intense flashes of initial passion, that renders it sluggish and ultimately keeps “Brokeback Mountain” from reaching great heights.
For a while, though, Lee builds a slowly smoldering tension ? or at least we sense a tension, an example of how hype works in the film’s favor. We know going in what the movie’s about, so we’re looking for traces of attraction from the first time Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) passively spy each other while waiting for work outside a rancher’s office.
Once they’re paired together as sheepherders on Brokeback Mountain, chatty Jack strikes up conversation early and often; taciturn Ennis responds mainly in monosyllabic mumbles. But he eventually opens up to Jack after sharing long days on horseback and long nights of whiskey by the campfire. (Prieto, known for an intimate, gritty aesthetic from shooting movies like “Amores Perros” and “8 Mile,” creates a completely different look here, one of vivid colors, bright sunlight and vast expanses.)
After they have sex one cold, drunken night, neither of them wants to talk about it.
“You know I ain’t queer,” Ennis finally says the next day, defiantly.
“Me neither,” Jack adds.
And maybe they’re not. Maybe what they experienced together wasn’t just sex and wasn’t love, but a form of human bonding that can’t be classified in convenient terms. Or maybe they were just lonely and bored.
But whatever happened stirred something deeply in both of them. Afterward, though, the pattern they fall into feels repetitive ? which is surprising from Lee, who has shown he can be a master of pacing in films like “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.”
Years pass. They each get married ? Ennis to the plain, conservative Alma (Michelle Williams); Jack to the saucy cowgirl Lureen (Anne Hathaway). They have babies. They have sex. They find new jobs. They have sex. They fight with their wives. They have sex. They go on “Same Time, Next Year”-style fishing trips where they never catch any fish. And they have sex.
Hathaway, the “Princess Diaries” star, is all grown up and perfect as the rich Texan who turns blonder and meaner as her disillusionment with her marriage grows. But it’s Williams who serves as the rock of the picture as a woman who knows what her husband is up to and doesn’t stop him for fear of destroying the family.
The truly tragic element in all this, though, is not that these men cannot be who they want to be, it’s that they’re not sure who they are. They become mired in traditional male roles from which they’re afraid to deviate because they don’t know how, because society won’t let them ponder their options ? though Jack’s a little more open to the idea than Ennis.