Brokeback Mountain

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The New York Sun

“Brokeback Mountain” disguises itself as a cultural event that has been waiting to happen. Yet it is not the Oscar-sweeping material that groundbreaking controversy always hopes to attend.

The movie plays on the expectation that a gay cowboy, like an apostate saint or a Penrose triangle, should explode – an expectation derived from a cosmopolitan craving for scandal or for red-blue scrimmaging. We’re reminded of a slew of homoerotic tropes: the Marlboro man, certain kinds of mustaches, riding chaps. The film itself, however, treats homosexual love more subtly than expected. The love story in this movie is a private affair, not at act of cultural heroism.

Based on one of E. Annie Proulx’s better short stories, “Brokeback Mountain” tells the story of two young hands who meet in the summer of 1963 on a picturesque sheepherding job in Wyoming. Their pastoral is inflected with corny realism – a surfeit of beans and a rascally bear dominate the plot for five enjoyable minutes – but basically it puts two young men on a crag, a floating world where a relationship becomes possible. After the summer ends, they go their separate ways and marry; the second half of the film follows their reunion through the inevitable frustration of a secret lifelong affair.

A film like this depends on chemistry, which Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger lack. Mr. Gyllenhaal, whose boyish face, with its Harlequin smile and suspiciously thick eyebrows, makes him a natural for diabolical Holden Caulfield roles like that in “Donnie Darko,” plays Jack Twist, the sexual instigator and rodeo-hopeful who turns out to be more emotionally needy than his partner, Ennis Del Mar.

Ennis stays in Wyoming, but Jack ends up in Texas. He is a Texas type: loved by women, distrusted by men. But with his blue eyes, fatty cheeks, and slick, clean-cut features, Mr. Gyllenhaal looks more like a scoutmaster than a cowboy.

Mr. Ledger, on the other hand, gets to play a real hero, and his performance as Ennis is a masterpiece. Ms. Proulx likes to give her characters a humble appearance: “Ennis, high-arched nose and narrow face, was scruffy and a little cave-chested, balanced a small torso on long, caliper legs, possessed a muscular and supple body made for the horse and for fighting,” she writes in the story. Mr. Ledger, though handsome, can suggest ugliness with his scraggly hair and short nose; more impressively, he acts ugly.

Head often bowed, Mr. Ledger’s Ennis hides behind his hat, even holding it between him and Jack when they first couple. He smiles rarely, and takes a studious attitude toward guns and knots. In moments of intimacy, he sucks in his cheeks in bottled consternation. As he ages, his head looks smaller and smaller, while his tan-colored jackets grow baggier on his thin frame. Best of all, Mr. Ledger’s cultivated high-plains accent sounds rough, warm, and hollow.

The predictable criticism of “Brokeback Mountain” is that the sex scenes have been toned down to win mainstream approval. But that is not what’s missing. Indeed, director Ang Lee has arranged for one indelible kiss that makes the whole movie – insofar as it is made.

Four years after coming down from the mountain, Ennis receives a postcard – “Friend, this letter is long overdue” – in Jack’s schoolteacher cursive (a winning detail). On the appointed day, Ennis takes off work, shuffles around the house, drinking beer out of brown bottles and looking out the window for Jack’s truck.

Jack is an old fishing buddy, he has told his wife, Alma (played with subdued pluck by Michelle Williams). When Jack finally pulls up, Ennis rushes out to meet him, closing the door behind him. They embrace for a lobbed second, and then lunge out of sight, in a blur of sudden antler-locking intimacy.

What is missing from the movie is concision. “Brokeback Mountain” is a short story, and between the offered fact of Jack and Ennis’s love and their sad conclusion, this feature-length film must delay, patrolling the Texas-Wyoming parallels and exploring the men’s married lives. In dwelling on Ennis’s marriage, Mr. Lee provides him with an excuse for his stubborn innocence – “You know I ain’t queer.” Jack understands this innocence as a fatal ambivalence.

Mr. Lee has portrayed unnerving sexual entanglements before – his Mandarin-language films, in particular the gay-themed “The Wedding Banquet,” are especially curious about sex – and his recent films have tried on different genres. “Brokeback Mountain” does both.

Essentially a love story, it is visually a thoroughgoing Western, with a camera always tilted up to get the big sky. Where Ms. Proulx is pleased to speak for the tight-lipped farmer, laying her million-dollar adjectives on ears that are happily deaf, Ang Lee is assiduously faithful to the Western quiet, as he was faithful to the unbeguiling 1970s outfits in “The Ice Storm,” to the gray light in “Sense and Sensibility,” and to the alien font of grace in “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.”

Here, Mr. Lee’s attention is perhaps most evident in the poor towns of Wyoming, where prewar machinery and accoutrements live on into the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. This is appropriate, as Ms. Proulx has always written as though the West were not a frontier, but an especially ancient part of America, whose modern inhabitants are vexed by its monstrous old-fashioned violence.

“Brokeback Mountain” is another irresistibly solid film from Ang Lee, but more importantly, it is a subtle advertisement for the diachronic integrity of the Wild West, for which homosexual themes prove a handy test case.


The New York Sun

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