Brokeback Mountain: Movie & DVD Review (2005)

(Originally published 2005)

Ang Lee' "Brokeback Mountain" begins in a picturesque nowhere of tall mountains and big skies, where cowboys and cattle roam, the air is clean, and the only stone wall here is the real thing, with nothing political muddying the mortar.

It's 1963, it's Wyoming, and what's even bigger than the sky is what is about to build between the two young men standing beneath it, Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal). When these two meet while seeking work tending sheep in the vast reaches of Brokeback Mountain, where they will live and work over the course of a defining summer, they are unprepared for what is about to hit them.

That would be love.

As written by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana from E. Annie Proulx's short story, this beautifully measured film, with its mounting passion, halting emotions, societal pressures, and devastating personal demons and frustrations that eat away at the fringes until they consume the center, is as much a love story as it is a tragedy.

Over the course of more than two decades, Lee follows their relationship, which takes a dramatic shift one drunken night when a shivering Ennis, who has slept under the cover of stars while Jack sleeps in a tent, joins Jack in an effort to seek shelter from the cold. It's a move that proves a pivotal turning point in their relationship, with the sex that follows so shocking to them--and so rough--it borders on the violent.

Next day, after a silence that stretches long into awkwardness, Ennis reveals what will prove a longer internal struggle. "I ain't no queer," he says. "Me neither," Jack responds.

Regardless of what they are, there's no denying what they feel, which is more complex and meaningful than any label they could attach to themselves, or the world could pin on them. What matters in "Brokeback" is that nothing will change who they are--not Alma (Michelle Williams), the woman Ennis marries and sodomizes who bears his two daughters, and not Lureen (Anne Hathaway), the wealthy Texas woman Jack marries who bears his son.

Through the years, their lives intertwine, with occasional fishing trips planned in which no fish are caught. Eventually, Jack urges that they scrap their marriages, move in together, start a business. But Ennis, a man of the fewest words whose troubles run deep because of the brutal murders of two gay men he saw in his youth, can't allow himself to be himself. The times won't allow for it, either. And so he and Jack exist in a limbo of lies and denial, their once fresh faces weighted from age, yes, but also from the knowledge that they can never be.

With its strong performances from Gyllenhaal and Williams, and its excellent performance from Ledger, whose inward turmoil gets to the film's universal themes of oppression, longing and shame, "Brokeback Mountain" will do well in the pending awards season, which is fine, but the greater issue at hand is that the movie nevertheless faces the same fate Ennis and Jack faced 40 years ago.

Bigots and homophobes will vilify it, some will fear it, others will dismiss it because of its subject. It's that unfortunate truth that suggests that some mountains, Brokeback or otherwise, remain just as insurmountable today as they ever have. And that fact is Lee's coup de grace.

Grade: A-