When Jack and Ennis first have sex (Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger, respectively) in Ang Lee’s Oscar-winning Brokeback Mountain, their communion is both combative and animalistic; though it’s not particularly romantic, it is undeniably passionate. They tangle with each other like odd-shaped magnets, succumbing to their mutual attraction while simultaneously resisting their own desires. The year is 1963 on a mountain range in secluded Big Sky country outside Signal, Wyoming. Despite the vastness of the open range, despite the distinct lack of peering eyes in any direction, the lovers find ways to hide — from the strictness of American masculinity, from each other, from themselves. For years after that night, they find each other again and again, but only in the valleys, as far away as they can get from judgment.
Brokeback Mountain, now the same age as the two-decade affair between its protagonists, remains as heart-wrenching today as it was back in 2005. Lee, together with cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, frame this once boundary-breaking Western romance in conversation with the majesty of the natural landscape around Jack and Ennis. Though it was subjected to so much spurious homophobia at the time of its release that many believed Paul Haggis’ can’t-we-all-just-get-along drama Crash prevailed as Best Picture in response at that year’s Academy Awards, it has long overshadowed its competition in the intervening years in insight and deeper human truth.
Brokeback Mountain Is A Portrait of Love At Its Most Magnetic
Adapted from the 1997 short story by Annie Proulx first published in The New Yorker, Brokeback Mountain less attempts to explore external homophobia than the internalized conflicts of gay individuals indoctrinated in heterosexual monogamy. Though both Jack and Ennis face their share of prejudice, especially in the film’s devastating denouement, it is their own fear of themselves which prevents them from pursuing their hearts. With his perpetually clenched jaw and pursed lips, Ledger’s Ennis wrestles most with this struggle, unable to accept his true desires even after the path to them has been cleared.
When the two meet, their inherent attraction is immediately evident. Ennis is introduced with his eyes downcast, seemingly swallowed up by his massive cowboy hat, legs crossed and closed up as he possibly can, as he leans against the trailer of their employer, Joe Aguirre (Randy Quaid). Jack pulls up in a sputtering black truck, kicking the hood in frustration after he parks; a man who shows up both already broken and more wild. As the two wait, wordlessly, for Joe to appear, Jack shaves with the help of his rear view mirror, where he can still, covertly, glimpse Ennis. Both are hired to herd sheep for the season up on Brokeback Mountain. They’ll be alone.
Throughout the film, editors Geraldine Peroni and Dylan Tichenor aggressively eliminate the element of time and space. During their summer together, Jack and Ennis are rarely seen except when together. From mealtime to sex to conversation, it is as if time does not exist outside the bounds of their burgeoning love. And the love they share mostly grows without words, but instead communicated via glances, teases, and inevitably that hungry, carnal embrace.
In the scenes that follow, Lee leaps forward in time with a confident if occasionally jarring disregard for exposition. Ennis marries Alma (Michelle Williams), with whom they raise two daughters, but it is clear he is uncomfortable in this role as a traditional patriarch; Jack marries Lureen (Anne Hathaway), a spunky rodeo queen, who he seems more attracted to than Ennis is to Alma. Jack seems more at ease in his position, and four years pass until their next meeting, when he sends a postcard to his old “fishing buddy,” Ennis, reigniting a flame that had barely gone out.
Screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana focus almost as much attention on the two lovers as they do on the people in their orbit. Michelle Williams, who had previously acted in her own queer role in If These Walls Could Talk 2, is devastating as Alma, a woman whose palpable pain is compounded by the inability to articulate what she knows to be true of her husband. Hathaway’s Lureen is less vulnerable than her counterpart, but she lets us see in subtle detail how sixteen years with a distant partner can harden someone we learn is already predisposed to emotional repression.
But, of course, Brokeback Mountain is mostly remembered for its lead performances, which remain two of cinema’s great on-screen depictions of both queer love and cowboy culture. Through them, Lee does not so much subvert Western iconography as languish in it. Gyllenhaal alternately plays Jack like a temperamental child and as an assured man, vacillating between the two in moments of uncertainty. When he says to Ennis those famous words, “I wish I knew how to quit you,” he has just finished angrily trying to communicate how difficult it is to exist in his “normal” life while carrying the weight of a love he cannot fully express. Jack isn’t like Ennis — he does not know the art of (or possess the discipline for) his would-be lover’s restraint — so he suffers without the consistent touch of his true partner.
Three years before he rewrote the rules of comic book movie villains by playing the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, Ledger disappears into Ennis in a different but equally powerful way. Ennis is a man who has become so accustomed to concealing his sexuality that he’s seemed to erase his entire identity in the process. But his placid demeanor can’t contain the emotions hidden beneath its surface; Ennis explodes outwardly in anger, slamming his fist against a brick wall upon leaving Jack behind, and later when picking a fight with a random truck driver.
What a tragedy we never got to know Ledger as an older man, to know what kind of artist he would’ve grown into, to know what love he could continue to give the silver screen.
Brokeback Mountain may have missed out on the top prize at the 2006 Oscars, but the significance of its nomination in that and seven other categories continues to reverberate. Despite being one of at least five LGBT-themed films just that year, homosexuality remained a marginalized topic. That said, people embraced its story commerically as well as critically: It earned nearly $180 million at the box office against its $14 million budget. Ang Lee won Best Director, the film won Best Adapted Screenplay and Score, and Ledger, Gyllenhaal and Williams were all nominated for their performances. While the loss of Ledger three years later sadly robbed audiences of more great work from him, the late actor’s costars have gone on to enduring (and eclectic) careers after demonstrating their mettle with its complex material.
20 years later, the knowledge that Ledger gave only four more performances before he passed away gives his performance even deeper weight, undercut by the cruel irony that moviegoers must watch him during the final hour of the film wearing makeup to add years he wouldn’t ever live through. What a tragedy we never got to know Ledger as an older man, to know what kind of artist he would’ve grown into, to know what love he could continue to give the silver screen.
Watching the film now, the loss of Ledger devastates anew, amplified by Gustavo Santaolalla’s gently searing score and Prieto’s images, which elicit the paintings of Albert Bierstadt or Thomas Kinkade. His absence today echoes the tragic, ultimately unfulfilled romance of its two main characters, and of the many queer lives that have suffered or otherwise been inhibited by an impermissive society. As uncertain — or perhaps anecdotal — as its cultural legacy might be to those individuals who found themselves validated by its existence, the cinematic legacy, at least, of Brokeback Mountain remains assured. Like the grand, mountainous backdrop of Jack and Ennis’s love, Ang Lee’s film contains more than enough space for audiences of all kinds to find themselves.
Brokeback Mountain premiered on September 2nd, 2005 at the Venice Film Festival before its theatrical release on December 9th, 2005.
- Release Date
-
January 13, 2006
- Runtime
-
134 minutes
- Director
-
Ang Lee
