If you wanted to grossly oversimplify what Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain is about, you could say it’s about two gay cowboys in a straight world. But once you’ve actually seen it, you won’t want to simplify it at all. One of the main reasons this is such a great film is that its love-story themes are as vast and as open as the wilderness settings where a lot of the story happens. To fixate on the film’s most obvious plot point—that the lovers are both men—is to miss the point entirely.
In fact, even calling the film “Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain” is too simple. Though some of its bigger themes of love, loss and regret in a too-rigid society are reminiscent of previous Lee films like Sense and Sensibility and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Brokeback owes its modern-Western authenticity and literary texture to a pair of Pulitzer-winning writers: Larry McMurtry, who co-wrote the screenplay with frequent collaborator Diana Ossana; and Annie Proulx, who wrote the original short story.
Actually, the basic plot is pretty simple. In 1963, two young ranch hands in Wyoming get hired to mind a herd of sheep for a summer. Alone together on the titular mountain, Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) alternate roles: one spends nights on the mountain with the sheep, while the other cooks and maintains their camp. One night they get drunk, too drunk for either of them to ride back to the sheep, and the cold forces them to share their small tent.
That first, violently passionate sexual encounter sets the tone for the ambiguities that define both the central relationship between Ennis and Jack, and the film as a whole. (”You know, I ain’t queer,” Ennis tells Jack the next morning. “Me neither,” Jack replies.) Eventually, their relationship spans decades. Both men lead the “normal” life expected of them, complete with wife and kids. But as often as they can, they use the guise of fishing trips to escape back to literal and figurative nature.
But like much of Ennis’s stoic, man-of-few-words personality, his physical unavailability leaves Jack wanting more. Where Jack is the dreamer who can imagine a life for the two of them despite everything, Ennis is the earthbound realist whose daddy once made damn sure Ennis knew what can happen to ranchers who shack up together.
That vital difference is clear enough in the characters’ dialogue, but the actors lend it a whole other level of depth. That’s especially true of Heath Ledger. He looks and sounds exactly like the kind of fellow you’d expect to find herding sheep in Wyoming (or for that matter, raising cattle in Fort Macleod, Alberta, where the film was actually shot). Squinty-eyed and tight-lipped, he mumbles half his lines and grunts the other half—and I mean that with the awestruck respect of someone who has just seen the guy from A Knight’s Tale deliver a portrayal that is better than Oscar-worthy. (None of this is to detract from Jake Gyllenhaal; it’s doubtful that Ledger’s Ennis would have been as effective without Gyllenhaal’s wide-eyed, idealistic Jack as a counterpoint.)
It falls to Ledger to utter the film’s cryptic but crucial final line. I won’t tell you what that line is (you already know if you’ve read the short story), but I will say that it makes for an ending as perfect as it is profoundly tragic. This film is one of the rare ones. It will hit you hard, then quietly haunt your mind for days. See it. You’ll love it, I swear.
(4/4)