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Here is a love story from
director Ang Lee in which the taboo word "love" is never spoken. In
fact the whole movie is a rich, spacious, passionate way of showing, not
telling, feelings that dare not speak their name - and doing so with superb
intelligence and magnificent candour. Brokeback Mountain is an adaptation of a
piece of writing from 1997 by Annie Proulx that already bears the burdensome
reputation of being the best short story ever to be published in the New Yorker
magazine: the tale of two itinerant ranch-hands in the early 1960s, Ennis and
Jack, who get a summer's work shepherding on Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming. They
are played here by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal. Thrown together, lonely
and frustrated, Ennis and Jack find that their relationship has grown deeper and
fiercer than friendship and they have sex. It is a glorious, revelatory
experience, and safe from society's disapproval on that remote Arcadian spot
they are at one with their own natures and with nature itself. And for the rest
of their lives, unhappily married with children, meeting every few years as
notional buddies for furtive "fishing trips", they yearn to recapture
that brief shining moment of happiness and truth. Beautifully composed and wonderfully acted,
this film is massively superior to the last Proulx adaptation - the woeful
Shipping News - and far better than Ang Lee's last cowboy movie, his very
moderate civil war drama Ride With the Devil. Most literary adaptations are
crushed, concertina-ed affairs in which a novel's various chapters, scenes and
characters are squeezed out. A short story is different, and this movie gives
you the feeling of wings being spread, not clipped. There is a real sense here
that the dimensions and space of the film have been stretched, and screenwriters
Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana have developed and extrapolated the source
material with flair, in particular giving a dramatic presence to the women in
Ennis and Jack's story. The wives are destined to be baffled and hurt, and
crucially realise that it is they, and not their menfolk, who are expected to
live out their lives in a state of denial. If anyone is the seducer it is Jack, played
by Gyllenhaal, whose performance - along with his presence in Sam Mendes's
forthcoming Gulf war movie Jarhead - shows that he has matured into one of the
most charismatic actors of his generation. Jack is a rodeo rider, a guy who
lopes and mopes around fairs most of his professional life in exchange for a few
seconds of thrashing ecstatically on the back of a bucking steer before being
painfully and all too quickly thrown off. The sexual metaphor is not, however,
laboured, and Jack's attempts to draw out the laconic, strong-and-silent Ennis
are not predatory but open-hearted and good-natured. Ennis himself is a humble
ranch-hand by trade, only doing the job so that he can make enough cash to marry
his sweetheart Alma (Michelle Williams) and, as he fiercely tells Jack, he
"ain't no queer". After their first sex, Ennis grimly heads off to his
sheep, getting into a habit of making work an alibi for non-commitment that will
last him for the rest of his life. The release of this film has already been
accompanied by a debate about how new and groundbreaking it is, and whether or
not there has always been a gay subtext to cowboy movies. I would be a
millionaire if I had 50p for every time someone mentioned Montgomery Clift and
John Ireland admiring each other's pistols in Howard Hawks's 1948 western Red
River. Unfortunately, this insight is often exaggerated to tease those
reactionary homophobes who often claim exclusive custody of the western, and
leaves unanswered the question of how or whether hints of homoeroticism are more
authentic than overt stories of heterosexual friendship. The conventions of
cowboy life and the bunkhouse were socially created circumstances in which gay
identity could be invisible, but Brokeback Mountain is surely new in
courageously removing invisibility's cloak, in removing the sub- from the
subtext, and asking how gay men can exist without living a lie, a question that
has not disappeared in 2006. It is a desperately sad story in many ways,
a story of two wasted lives, but a beautiful and moving story, too. Jake becomes
a sellout, working for his obnoxious father-in-law selling farm machinery, and
Ennis turns into a grumpy and taciturn old cowpoke - their true selves become
more poignantly inaccessible with each unsatisfactory holiday together. Further
than this, Brokeback Mountain is the story of how most of our lives, gay and
straight, are defined by one moment in which things go gloriously and naturally
right, when everything falls into place, but which is then infected by the
bacilli of wrongness. Ennis and Jack, flawed as they are, do their best to
resist the encroachment of that infection; they fight not just against bigotry,
but dullness and mediocrity. Their story is not tragic, but heroic. Peter Bradshaw, reprinted from the Guardian 6 Jan 2006 |
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