Brokeback Mountain

[Chris Knipp]

Ang Lee: Brokeback Mountain

Powerful adaptation with great acting is the year's best American film

Review by Chris Knipp

"Brokeback Mountain," published eight years ago, is one of E. Annie Proulx's most admired stories. Quietly, understatedly, it describes the tragic epic love affair of a cowboy and a ranch hand who lived in Wyoming and Texas in the Sixties and Seventies. It's very much about an American time and place where such a love cannot be spoken, barely even lived, but in this case is so intense it comes to dominate the two men's lives. These "two deuces, going nowhere" meet working one summer on the named mountain tending sheep. One cold night their latent sexual desire for each other grabs them while they're snuggling to keep warm in a tent. It doesn't stop there. In fact it never stops.

After the job ends and they part, there's a huge longing that clings to both of them even though they don't see each other for four years and both get married. They wind up meeting every few months for twenty years, whenever they can, pretending to go on fishing trips.

The dirt poor ranch hand, Ennis Del Mar-- the Heath Ledger character in the new Ang Lee film -- continually tries to deny the intense desire for the other man and fight it, but Jack Twist (the Jake Gyllenhaal character) nonetheless is the love of his life. If we learn nothing else we learn that. Ultimately the story hits you with a wallop of emotion that's all the more powerful because of all the self denial, the barren terrain, you might say, on which this one big bright flower of forbidden and denied love still insistently and powerfully and painfully grew.

Annie Proulx's story touched me when I first read it. It spoke to something deep inside of me that I can't explain. I'm no cowboy. I didn't grow up in the rural West. But in some strange way it seemed my story. The repression, the hiding, the passion, the sadness, fit experiences of mine. I knew the feeling of hiding and not being able to talk about experiences that were more important to me than anything, while trying to feign conventional feelings and tastes. This is a story that gay men from other times and places have lived and that unfortunately many still live: the self denial, the repression, the fear of others' opinions and danger of being found out; the living of conventional "straight" lives that in the end don't really work and may even go very bad. Gay men who have lived this story know its sadness but also its hidden beauties and excitements. Much of Proulx's story isn't pretty, but it contains in it secrets of forbidden love you don't find many places.

The movie has to add stuff, to flesh out the details of the men's lives when they're apart that you may not remember from the story, but it hits you with the same wallop. The screenplay Larry McMurtry (of The Last Picture Show) and Diana Ossana have written expands Proulx's dry, terse tale without changing its essential pain, though it's a tough job -- and a tribute to the writing -- that it doesn't, because Ang Lee has made things so pretty, and clear, that you have to look for moments when the original spareness comes back.

It's in the way Heath Ledger talks. Ledger develops such a rich range of mumbles and coughs and grunts it's like a symphony built out of three notes. The movie has several performances in it that are peerless, but the standout is Heath Ledger, who has emerged in 2005 as the serious actor he wanted to be. Ledger's Ennis Del Mar is a wonderful character, tough, laconic, lonely, passionate, repressed. This performance of Ledger's alone is a joy, and it will endure.* Most every scene between Jack and Ennis evokes the tension and force of Proulx's tightlipped style.

The story's original spareness is there in the way the men make love, or mix kissing and fighting. It's especially there too in the way the film's bookended: the opening sequence of Ennis and Jack waiting for the boss (Randy Quaid) to show up so they can get hired. They're standing wordless, seemingly for hours, hiding under their hats, but as Anthony Lane suggests, even then they're probably already falling in love. At the end when Ennis visits Jack's parents, this is one of the best places. Their spaces and their faces are as lean as Proulx's sentences. It might have been nice to feel more of that leanness in between, but the wives and families had to be fleshed out; that was part of the game the filmmakers took on.

The Ang Lee version, with its beautiful photography and surprising actors, brought out in this viewer a sense of cumulative awakening of all the repressed awarenesses the story had first aroused eight years back. I remain so shaken it's hard even to write about it objectively and seems ridiculous to try to find fault with something that seems so right as a filming of Annie Proulx's tale that it would be a personal betrayal for me not to consider it the American movie of the year. Brokeback Mountain may or may not be a great movie (it's already well on the way to becoming a celebrated one), but it's a great cinematic realization of an outstanding piece of writing. There's nobody in it who isn't good; you'd have to simply list the whole cast. Suffice it to say that Jake Gyllenhaal, who's had quite a good year in movies himself, is just right for the other main role: he has the sweetness, the strength, and the sincerity to balance Ledger's sad aching self repression.



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*Stephen Holden in the New York Times: "Mr. Ledger magically and mysteriously disappears beneath the skin of his lean, sinewy character. It is a great screen performance, as good as the best of Marlon Brando and Sean Penn."