Among all the usual blockbusters
depending for their success on the latest in technology, monsters, and
publicity, the movie generating the loudest buzz this season, surprisingly, is
a relatively small and decidedly unspectacular story of an extended love affair
between two cowboys.
Most of the commentary surrounding Brokeback Mountain predictably focuses
on the fact of homosexuality, with solemn sociological discussions of the
plight of gay men in the West, forced to wander the range alone, suffering the
love that dare not speak its name without even a support group and sometimes
even endangered by the bigotry of their fellows. On the other hand, the usual
conservative haters and crybabies, ignoring all those gay Republicans, complain
that the movie once again advances the agenda of some group they call the
liberal Hollywood elite, who apparently want to convert the nation to a deviant
sexual orientation.
In reality, despite its apparent
subversion of the myth of the West, the movie quite intelligently examines a
number of the subjects and themes of major American literature as well as the
most American of all the popular genres. Like such masterpieces as The Leatherstocking Tales, Moby Dick, and Huckleberry Finn, the genre includes numerous examples of moments
that celebrate the familiar and sometimes ambiguous ideal of male comradeship,
appearing in the several treatments of Billy the Kid and his nemesis Pat
Garrett, and such famous titles as Johnny
Guitar, Warlock, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
The vision of a wilderness where men
follow their violent destiny beyond the influence of wives, mothers, and
sweethearts suggests a juvenile, perhaps presexual fantasy of adventurous
bachelorhood not all that distant from the eternal childhood of Peter Pan, which informs a great many
Westerns, including BrokebackMountain.
From the beginning the movie quietly
and sometimes ironically both emphasizes and undermines its tradition, showing
its two cowboys, Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal),
hiring on to guard a flock of sheep, usually a hated occupation in the Western.
Initially strangers, they set up their camp in the Wyoming
mountains and become friends, then quite suddenly, lovers, forming an odd and
mostly interrupted relationship that lasts for many years.
After the sheep herding season ends,
they part to follow their separate ways many miles apart, Ennis to marriage and
ranch work, Jack to riding bulls in the rodeo, where he meets the woman who
becomes his wife, Lureen (Anne Hathaway). Keeping in touch through sporadic
postcards, they meet occasionally over the years, ostensibly to camp out and
fish, in reality to recall and repeat their happiness on BrokebackMountain.
Despite their awareness of the stigma
and the dangers of homosexuality in their part of the world, and the tensions
within their respective marriages, the two somehow manage to maintain the
relationship and the passion of their sexual connection. The movie actually,
however, shows a great deal more of their separate lives rather than their time
together, concentrating particularly on Ennis and his wife Alma (Michelle
Williams), who discovers the truth of her husband’s friendship with Jack and
eventually divorces him.
The contrast between their domestic
lives and their time together constitutes the real subject and engenders the
real themes of the movie, in effect juxtaposing freedom and constriction, the
stunning beauty of the mountains with the stifling bourgeois comfort of Jack’s
marriage and the mean little town where Ennis scrapes out a living. In keeping
with its tradition, the film celebrates geography and landscape, on one hand
the old West of horsemen dwarfed by the immensity of endless space, majestic
mountains, and stunning vistas, and on the other, the modern West of
hardscrabble ranches, subsistence jobs, honky tonk saloons, house trailers, and
cramped apartments above the grocery store.
Again observing its heritage, the
picture works mostly through images and silence, reflected not only in its many
essentially soundless scenes, but in the exceptional restraint of its actors.
In some remarkable moments,
particularly in a scene where he meets Jack Twist’s parents in their bleak
farmhouse, Heath Ledger shows that he can speak his heart without saying a
word. He emphasizes the essential loneliness of the Western and the Westerner,
not only the heartbreak of love and loss, but the elegiac quality of the form,
which fittingly always somehow mourns a time forever past.
Brokeback Mountain (R), directed by
Ang Lee, opens Friday, January 6, at Little Theatres, Henrietta 18, and
Pittsford Cinema.
This article appears in Jan 4-10, 2006.
