BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN

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I wanted to let y'all know that I saw BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN -- and that all of you owe it to yourselves to see it too. It is beautiful, and haunting, and everything I hoped it would be. Heath Ledger is the one who's being touted for an Oscar nomination but Jake Gyllenhaal is every bit as deserving. Both performances ring 100% true and are unforgettable. The cinematography is breathtaking and the music suits the story perfectly. Ang Lee is a great filmmaker and proves it again with this wonderful, devastating film.

This review is from Outword, a California gay newspaper based in San Diego.

BROKEBACK Goes to the Top of the Mountain

by Chris Narloch

Whenever and however you see it, the important thing is that BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN gets support from gay audiences. Ang Lee's graceful cinematic version breaks new ground at the movies, and it honors both Annie Proulx's original short story and gay people in general. Proulx's story is masterful in its economy. The whole thing is only about 30 pages, and yet it has so much feeling and depth to it that after I read it, I felt as if I had completed an entire novel.

The movie fleshes out the story in interesting ways and yet remains absolutely faithful to both the spirit of the original and to every major plot point. The film begins with the first meeting in 1963 of Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), two young men who accept jobs as sheepherders for a season up on the pristinely beautiful Brokeback Mountain. It isn't long before the two men are sharing a tent and a blanket to keep warm, and then sharing each other.

Lee stages these scenes of homosexual awakening exactly as they are described in the story -- the first sexual encounter is almost animalistic. After that, Lee cleverly alternates scenes of great tenderness between the men with moments in which they try to knock each other's teeth out. Without need for much dialogue, the director crystallizes for the audience the fact that these two guys are working out their feelings and their shame over them the only way they know how -- physically. This is perfect because the way Lee films the love scenes, you sometimes can't tell where the fighting ends and the sex begins.

After they come down off the mountain for the first time, Ennis acts as if nothing happened, and the two men go their separate ways, although you can see in Jack's eyes that he wants more. This scene pretty much sums up their relationship through the rest of the story. Ennis is in denial and can't allow himself to fully commit, while Jack wants more than just "a few high-altitude f***s" during the pair's semi-annual "fishing trips" back to Brokeback Mountain.

The men both marry and raise families, continuing to see each other occasionally on the side for twenty years. The movie is very clear concerning the damage this type of arrangement can wreak on everyone involved. The lovers are not condemned by the moviemakers but by the society in which they live, and they pay the price for their affair.

The posters for the movie use the line "Love is a force of nature" -- and for once it's truth in advertising. The scenes on the mountain are so spectacular that you think, "Yeah, anybody could fall in love with anybody surrounded by scenery like that." Of course, what Proulx and Lee (and screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana) are really getting at is the idea that in nature, isolated from the laws and moral codes constructed by society, the two men are free to follow their hearts.

Back in "civilization", the major roadblock for Ennis is a memory of horrific homophobic violence from his childhood that has clearly crippled him emotionally. He can't let anyone, male or female, get too close. (There's a great scene in which a young woman asks Ennis to dance in a bar, and he is so closed off both physically and emotionally that he just sort of stands there pitifully.)

These are breakthrough lead performances, especially Ledger's heartbreaking work as Ennis. You can tell the actor has thought out how a man who is in denial might walk and talk (or barely talk). Ennis' frustration at his situation frequently boils over into rage (both at Jack and at total strangers), and these extremes of "masculine" behavior -- ranging from stoic silence to fury -- make it all the more shocking when he finally breaks down in tears.

As good as Ledger is, I hope Gyllenhaal doesn't get overlooked when praise is doled out. As the ardent, open-hearted one, who is far more comfortable with his orientation and longs to settle down with his lover on a little ranch somewhere, the actor uses his trademark vulnerability and sensitivity to great effect. The bottom line is both actors are brave and believable in their roles. Also effective are the supporting performances by Anne Hathaway and, especially, Michelle Williams as the pair's long-suffering wives.

I always worry about over-praising a movie, fearing that people will be disappointed. I think it may be impossible for gay people to be disappointed by BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, however, because it's something we haven't seen before. I have been waiting all my life for a first-class, all-star, tearjerker love story, like CASABLANCA or THE WAY WE WERE or OUT OF AFRICA, only with gay lovers. The wait is over. This is it.

YAY, thats so awesome! i was in my local movi theatre today, and they had hung up the poster. so pretty soon ill get to see it too. and anne hathaway is really kool too. she would be great in some sort of neurological drama type of movie, maybe as an aspie. she was great in the princess diaries.(no im not 13)
well im just waiting for them to put up a mozart & the whale poster, not that'd be awesome.

I urge you all to go see this movie. It's opening in more cities and states today, so please treat yourselves to this beautiful film. You owe it to yourselves to see it.

Ang Lee: The Outword Interview

by Chris Narloch

"There's a private feeling to the movie, an intimate feeling. I think eventually everyone has a BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN in them. Someone you want to come back to. And of course, some people don't come back."

That's director Ang Lee discussing his new movie, the long-awaited big-screen adaptation of Pulitzer Prize-winner Annie Proulx's celebrated short story about two young men -- a ranch hand and a rodeo cowboy -- who forge a lifelong connection while working together on Brokeback Mountain. I recently spoke with Lee, the Oscar-winning director of CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON and SENSE AND SENSIBILITY about his life and career and his new movie, which is already generating Oscar buzz. BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN is also causing a stir as a result of some steamy scenes between actors Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, who play the lovers in the film.

OUTWORD: Ang, why is it that Annie's story has touched so many people, and why did you want to film it?
ANG LEE: It's a remarkable story. It's only about thirty pages, and yet it hits you hard and twists your guts. She did something very unique, which was to combine two very different genres -- a macho Western and a gay love story. I had read it four or five years ago and was knocked out, then put it aside and did THE HULK. But I couldn't get it out of my mind. It's a very poignant love story.

OUTWORD: People keep referring to the movie as "the gay Western" or "the gay cowboy movie". Does that annoy you, and do you worry that those kinds of labels might limit its box-office?
ANG LEE: That does have a funny kind of connotation. It sounds like we're making BLAZING SADDLES or something. This is not a comedy. It's a gay love story set in the West.

OUTWORD: I had read initially that you weren't sure if you were going to show Jake and Heath being intimate, that you thought it might be too distracting for audiences?
ANG LEE: The story is so intimate that there has to be believability to the sex scenes for the passion in the story to work. It will be shocking for some people and not enough for others. You can't please everybody.

OUTWORD: Do you think mainstream audiences are ready for a film that breaks new ground in terms of sexuality and homosexuality on the screen?
ANG LEE: The reaction has been positive so far. It's interesting because some straight men have told me they were disturbed by the fact that it didn't bother them. I think it could be liberating for some men, gay and straight. Women like love stories anyway.

OUTWORD: The flashback to Ennis' childhood where his father forces him to look at the dead gay man is, I think, appropriately graphic. How important was it dramatically to show the result of homophobic violence?
ANG LEE: Very important. I actually shot more than what ended up in the scene you're talking about and decided to cut it back. But it's necessary in order to explain why Ennis is so brooding and tortured and why he blows his chance for happiness.

OUTWORD: Jake Gyllenhaal is considerably more attractive than the description of Jack Twist in the story. How important is it in terms of audience sympathy that these characters are played by handsome, famous actors?
ANG LEE: It goes with the territory. People expect that. You have to deal with genre more in movies. Jake provides that dreamy, romantic, Hollywood love story element.

OUTWORD: One of your earlier films, THE WEDDING BANQUET, also dealt with two gay men who have a secret relationship. That was a much lighter film, and yet you obviously are not afraid of risky, even taboo, subject matter. Did you have a liberal upbringing or do you just like to take chances as an artist?
ANG LEE: I actually had a very conservative upbringing, but I had liberal friends in New York when I was at film school. I found Western culture and that liberated me. You have to find a balance between being true to yourself and respecting society. That's Ennis' problem. He puts what society thinks ahead of his need to be true to himself, and by the time he realizes what he's done it's too late. His chance has passed him by.

OUTWORD: The fact that Heath was falling in love with another of his co-stars, Michelle Williams, who plays his wife, during filming -- do you think that had any effect on his performance?
ANG LEE: Heath has said that I pushed him towards Jake, and he ran to Michelle. That's their personal life. Heath gives an excellent performance in the movie.

OUTWORD: You made another, more traditional Western, RIDE WITH THE DEVIL, that I really liked. Were you disappointed that it didn't do better at the box office?
ANG LEE: Thank you. Frankly, the studio dumped it. The same thing happened with THE ICE STORM. They didn't know what to do with it.

OUTWORD: Were you surprised by the enormous success of CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON? It's only the most successful foreign film in U.S. history.
ANG LEE: I worked very hard for a year to promote it. That genre was going downhill, but the screening at Cannes was very well-received. I'm happy that it reinvigorated the genre.

OUTWORD: Any plans yet for future films?
ANG LEE: No plans except to promote BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN for the next several months.

The Ice Storm.
One of my favorite movies......Weird, quiet, many akward moments......just like me! All of my freinds hated it!
Great music, great cinimatography.....I love it.

I'm going to watch it tomorrow!


And I'll be sure to check out Broke back mountain once it's on DVD.

>>And I'll be sure to check out Brokeback Mountain once it's on DVD.<<

It really should be seen on the big screen for the gorgeous Wyoming scenery (actually filmed in Canada).

Big Gay Andy

Not my kind of movie

All I know is that it's about gay cowboys...and they are probably eating pudding

DENIED

I understand, but I've got a 65" widescreen HD tv in the basement....it'll do.
Also I live in redneck-hell Kentucky....those types of movies arent tolerated very well here (there will likely be some heckling somewhere around here at some point during the films release.....I wouldn't be suprised if some theaters refuse to run it because of the subject)....and I don't like to go to theaters as there is always some jerkoff who brings their screeming child.

The last movie I saw in the theater was Lord of the Rings III.

>>All I know is that it's about gay cowboys...and they are probably eating pudding<<

No, Cartman, no pudding-eating in this movie -- but they do eat a lot of beans when they're on the mountain!

Big Gay Andy

Here are several beautiful, must-read articles on the movie --

Hello cowboy

Ang Lee's award-winning gay western is the most important film to come out of America in years, says B. Ruby Rich

Friday September 23, 2005
The Guardian

Wyoming, 1963. Two young drifters turn up at a remote office and get hired to spend the summer together, herding sheep high up on Brokeback Mountain. Suspicious, laconic, stunned by cold and hardship, they don't seem a natural pair - until, drunk one night, enforced intimacy turns to sexual contact. It's a contact that is just as unexpected and unacceptable to them as it remains to some today, especially in the rural American west. In a stunning reversal, though, the drifters fall emotionally and physically in love. Up on idyllic Brokeback Mountain, far from social approbation, Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) luxuriate in a rough-and-tumble idyll as Edenic in spirit as it is in setting. The mountain seems to bless their union, but inexorably the air begins to chill, they come down off the mountain, and they part. Five years later, they meet again - now married with children - and Ang Lee's extraordinary saga, Brokeback Mountain, advances through the decades with them.

Every once in a while a film comes along that changes our perceptions so much that cinema history thereafter has to arrange itself around it. Think of Thelma and Louise or Chungking Express, Blow-Up or Orlando -- all big films that taught us to look and think and swagger differently. Brokeback Mountain is just such a film. Even for audiences educated by a decade of the New Queer Cinema phenomenon - from Mala Noche and Poison to High Art and Boys Don't Cry - it's a shift in scope and tenor so profound as to signal a new era.

A fortnight ago, Ang Lee flew to Venice to accept the Golden Lion grand prize at the Venice film festival. Last week, Ledger and Gyllenhaal flew to Canada to accept the wild ovations of the crowds at the Toronto International film festival. Quite simply, despite the long careers of Derek Jarman, Gus Van Sant, John Waters, Gregg Araki, Todd Haynes, Patricia Rozema, or Ulrike Ottinger, there has never been a film by a brand-name director, packed with A-list Hollywood stars at the peak of their careers, that has taken an established conventional genre by the horns and wrestled it into a tale of homosexual love emotionally positioned to ensnare a general audience. With Brokeback Mountain, all bets are off.

The vast majority of New Queer Cinema works were gritty urban dramas, set in New York or Chicago, Portland or London. Firmly grounded in the realities of gay life, they sought a new vocabulary for a post-AIDS experience. Its film-makers prioritized a new kind of storytelling geared to the unprecedented narratives filling their lives and lenses. These were usually sidebar films, not galas; they were most often Directors' Fortnight or Sundance films, not Cannes or Venice main competitions - not at least until Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven and Kimberly Pierce's Boys Don't Cry. They were festival films through and through, not multiplex movies.

Now, Brokeback Mountain has blown this division wide open, collapsing the borders and creating something entirely new in the process. With utter audacity, renowned director Ang Lee, aided and abetted by legendary novelist-screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana and master storyteller Annie Proulx, have taken on the most sacred of all American genres, the western, and queered it.

Peering down through the years at the power of that Brokeback Mountain summer on the lives of Ennis and Jack, Lee delivers a virtually forensic vision of desire, denial and emotional cost. The depth of Ennis and Jack's attachment to one another gives their lives meaning and drains all other meaning out of them, rendering the men both enriched and emotionally destitute. If Brokeback Mountain never shies away from the sexual truth of that attachment, it doesn't settle for the merely explicit either. It's a great love story, pure and simple. And simultaneously the story of a great love that's broken and warped in the torture chamber of a society's intolerance and threats, an individual's fear and repression.

In the end, Brokeback Mountain is a grand romantic tragedy, joining the ranks of great literature as much as great cinema. Tuning into the gay experience in all its euphoric and foreboding chords, Lee has brought the skills he honed in Sense and Sensibility for etching heartache, and those he found in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon for conveying emotion through action. Setting the film in 1963 places it squarely before Stonewall, the gay-liberation movement, or the identity politics of modern queer identities.

As Brokeback Mountain moves the men's story forward through the decades, as they escape from their wives and pursue each other through fishing trips (nope, those will never be innocent again) in an effort at recapturing the rural bliss of their primal scene, the isolation of setting and frozen emotional boundaries of the love preclude any intrusion of more modern accepting attitudes. If that seems an artificial excision concocted to heighten drama, consider that Proulx's story originally appeared in the New Yorker in 1997, the year before University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard was brutally murdered for being gay. Shepard was tortured and killed in October 1998, just outside Laramie, in cowboy country, just shy of his 22nd birthday. Oh yes, among his other interests, Shepard loved to fish and hunt. His cruel fate for the simple sin of homosexuality was a horrific reminder of exactly how provisional and geographically specific contemporary tolerance remains.

Now, however, the first wave of critics to see the film have already begun to build on the obvious, informing readers that westerns were already gay; there has already been a rush of wanton nomination as genre favourites are reconsidered. It's irresistible, I suppose, but it's all wrong. Ever since the dawn of feminist film criticism and theory in the 1970s, film scholars have analysed the homoerotic subtexts in the homosocial world of the classic western. But Brokeback Mountain goes much further, for it turns the text and subtext inside out and reads the history of the west back through an uncompromisingly queer lens. Not only does the film queer its cowboys, but it virtually queers the Wyoming landscape as a space of homosexual desire and fulfilment, a playground of sexuality freed from judgment, an Eden poised to restore prelapsarian innocence to a sexuality long sullied by social shame.

But Brokeback Mountain has a lineage to which it can lay claim. Consider, for instance, Giant, the 1956 film starring James Dean in his final role as the black sheep of a Texas cattle-ranching family. Given the tales of Dean's bisexuality and his claims to have worked as a street hustler, his cowboy duds in that final posthumous role were frosting on the cake. Cowboys had long been a gay fantasy anyway, as their manly ways and absence of womenfolk allowed fantasies of desire to run free.

Andy Warhol certainly had noticed the appeal of hunky cowboys for the gay imagination -- and the dangers they courted. He had his early feature film, Lonesome Cowboys, shot in 1968 in Oracle, Arizona, utilizing a movie-ready Main Street constructed nearly 30 years earlier for use in westerns. But Warhol became a target of an FBI investigation after locals and tourists complained of immoral goings-on on set.

Lonesome Cowboys won the best-film award at the San Francisco film festival at the end of the year. It was 1968, after all, and the counter-culture was taking over the mainstream. Morality was up for grabs, and Warhol's hip version of aberrance was wildly appealing -- and widely denounced by outraged citizens with the FBI at their disposal. Consider that, in Lee's film, 1968 is the year in which Jack and Ennis reunite, the year in which Ennis begins his long refusal even to consider Jake's pleas to live out their days together.

In 1969, Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight would rocket to superstardom with Midnight Cowboy, an urban vision that explicitly followed Warhol's lead in ascribing queerness to cowboy's duds and physique and enduring male friendships. Through Voight's education regarding what fantasies he's come to New York City to serve, he also glimpses the true love that can simmer in a buddy in jeans.

Lonesome Cowboys and Midnight Cowboy cemented the cowboy-hustler motif in the popular imagination and lifted a subculture to the surface, writing the cowpoke into the book of gay desire for decades to come. But Lee also knows something else, from his years of making films that tread with exquisite delicacy on the suffering of the human heart. He knows that great love and suffering are sometimes packaged together. He knows that self-denial is as finely tuned a punishment as the damage any posse could inflict. He knows that the death of the heart, to add Elizabeth Bowen to these citations, knows no bounds of gender, nationality, or era.

It is fascinating indeed that after his green mis-step in The Hulk, Lee has returned to the subject matter of his first triumph, The Wedding Banquet, released more than a decade earlier to great critical praise. And it's noteworthy that Lee's longtime producer and scenarist James Schamus (co-president of Focus Features, the company that produced and will release Brokeback Mountain), also executive-produced many of the New Queer Cinema films, often alongside the legendary Christine Vachon. He's credited on Poison, Swoon, and Safe.

Times have changed, and unlike the sunny, upbeat The Wedding Banquet, this new film carries the burden of a crushing societal threat that will not be solved by a turnabout of forgiving parents. Brokeback Mountain, by raising the stakes, merits far greater praise. Ang Lee has done nothing less than re-imagined America as shaped by queer experience and memory. Alas, it cannot be a sunny picture.

Across the great divide

Brokeback Mountain is far more than a gay western. It's a great American love story, writes Rick Moody

Saturday December 17, 2005
The Guardian

I first read "Brokeback Mountain", the short story on which Ang Lee's new film is based, when I was judging a short story award in 1998. It's by Annie Proulx, but I didn't know that then. The names of the writers were stripped from the works for the purposes of the competition. The early pages of this unknown western narrative did not interest me, because I thought at that time, and think still, that the myth of the Old West, with its gunslingers and traditional masculine bravado, was stifling, repellent, and misguided. And yet I remember calling out to my wife, midway through this particular story, saying, "I'm reading this cowboy story that I thought I was going to hate. I thought the only way I was going to like it was if these cowboys had sex! And then they did!"

When I imagined seeing Ang Lee's new film adaptation of Brokeback Mountain, based on a screenplay by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, I imagined the first kiss of its two protagonists. How many such cinematic kisses have we seen? Before how many western sunsets? How many happy endings in which the binary molecule of man and woman embracing rationalises the messy, blood-spattered colonization of the western half of the North American continent and makes it tolerable anew? I thought I wanted the kiss between the two men in Brokeback Mountain to be long, sloppy and ravenous. Because I wanted this kiss to help upend this mythology of the west. But the film does even more than that. The first coupling between Jack and Ennis does not feature the kiss I wanted. It doesn't feature any kiss. It features a lot of violent grunting and groaning, some embraces that look remarkably like fisticuffs, and some prominent use of a part of the body that reputedly got certain towns in the Old Testament flattened by God.

It is hard, therefore, not to think of Brokeback Mountain as an incredibly salient political statement for troubled times. I'm sure that there are many public relations professionals right now trying to pretend that this is not the case, that this film is not an affront to certain senators from Wyoming and Texas and Utah and Colorado and Montana and Idaho, and perhaps an affront to the president of the United States himself, who comes from the state often burlesqued in Ang Lee's film. The president, I presume, will not be screening it at the White House.

In truth, many things act against the prospect of success for this ambitious project. The script was kicking around for almost seven years and even a director as accomplished as Gus van Sant could not find actors who were willing to undertake it. It was budgeted at a level so thrifty that it's a miracle it looks as stylish and painterly as it does. This was likely to be a famously unproduced movie. And yet here it is.

In the United States, where it opened recently, Lee's Brokeback Mountain is being marketed as "a great American love story". However, just as it was impossible to know that the same director's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was subtitled until the lights dimmed and the projectionists rolled the film, you will find this beautiful, still, melancholy cowboy movie -- which concerns a fervent and furtive romance between two men in the rural American west -- a bit, uh, surprising if, like many in the US, you harbor the prejudice that a great love story takes place between a man and a woman. Yes, there's no doubt that the studio that released Brokeback Mountain is keen to stay on message. And yet calling Lee's film a "gay cowboy movie", as I've heard it described, would not exactly be a way into the hearts, minds and pocketbooks of, arguably, the most homophobic nation on earth. Of course, whether it is a "gay" movie or a "love story" is one of the interesting questions about Brokeback Mountain.

There is also the question of whether or not Lee's film is a genuine western. The western, in American cinema, is one of the foundational genres. It's the bedrock on which the language of film was constructed. It's the genre on which American identity was staked. Rugged individualism! Life outside the law! Manifest destiny! To tell this western as a movie is an audacious, ambitious thing. To tell this story as a movie is to tilt at the very history of the cinematic form.

By and large, the narrative of Brokeback Mountain follows the outline of Proulx's justly celebrated short story, which first appeared in the New Yorker magazine in 1997. A young ranch hand in Wyoming, Ennis Del Mar, signs on to do some sheep herding in the Rocky Mountains one summer, in the process meeting another such young man, Jack Twist. The two become fast friends, and there the matter seems to rest until a night when the temperature has plummeted and they elect to share a tent. As in the helter-skelter of Nature, which seems to unfurl limitlessly just beyond their tiny provisional shelter, one thing leads to another, after which the two spend the rest of their allotted time on Brokeback Mountain, the summer range for their flock of sheep, like lovers do.

The rest of the story is told through crosscutting, as the men try to go back to their respective lives as before, unperturbed by this unbidden, unsought, yet life-changing experience in the mountains. Ennis marries the lovely Alma, and almost immediately he begins to make a botch of their union, though he manages to help raise a pair of adorable daughters. Jack, meanwhile, meets and haphazardly courts a somewhat loose rodeo girl from Texas, Lureen. He finds prosperity as a salesman of farm equipment in her father's business. Still, Jack, of the two men, is the more willing to try to pursue his secret life. The results are not only bad, but potentially dangerous, as Ennis warns him, during one of their later semi-annual assignations: "If we're around each other, and this thing grabs ahold of us again in the wrong place, at the wrong time, we'll be dead."

This line is mumbled by actor Heath Ledger, in the midst of an arresting and career-defining performance as Ennis, in which his anguished taciturnity seems both consonant with some of the finest performers in cinematic westerns -- Henry Fonda, John Wayne -- and entirely plausible -- according to a more realistic code of the cinematic west, which Lee has announced as one of his own ambitions. Ledger's Ennis Del Mar has a stark charisma that's balanced perfectly with the confusion that seems to come off him in waves. Through much of the later portion of the film he seems to be sitting alone in bars drinking, and the heartache of his predicament is so palpable as to bring tears to one's eyes.

Jake Gyllenhaal, as Jack Twist, provides a bit more of a challenge for those who would admire this film unreservedly. Lee has spoken of a desire to have younger actors for the principals -- since they need to age 20 years during the course of the story -- rather than older actors trying to appear spry at the outset. While Ledger seems to collapse into middle age convincingly, Gyllenhaal struggles in the later scenes with his prosthetic paunch and Freddie Mercury mustache. That said, Gyllenhaal, at least to this viewer, convincingly longs for the person of another man. He moves without a cowboy's easy grace. He moves, as Jack Twist, like someone for whom the trappings of western masculinity are indeed trappings, and his youthful bravado in the early scenes on Brokeback Mountain is lovable and sweet.

Proulx's story is largely told in a laconic third-person voice from the perspective of Ennis Del Mar. The accounts of Jack are mainly available to the reader through dialogue between Ennis and Jack. But in Lee's adaptation, a number of Texas-based scenes are invented for Jack and his rodeo-girl wife, Lureen. While the Wyoming scenery of Ennis Del Mar seems sand-blasted, woebegone, and desperate, as if cribbed from the dust bowl photos of Walker Evans, the Texas scenes are hyperbolic. Lureen has four or five different hairstyles in the film, each of them excessive, and on the basis of this film it appears that no man can live in Texas without a bola tie. It's as if Larry McMurtry, unable to match the wry but stoic tone of Proulx's story, has bulked out the screenplay with additional material from his own early work.

Lee is a connoisseur of good composers, having for example adorned The Ice Storm (full disclosure: I wrote the book on which it was based) with a stunning score by Mychael Danna, and done the same with the Tan Dun cello score for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, a composition so good that it was performed many times on its own. How then to account for the rather lackluster guitar suite that accompanies much of Brokeback Mountain? It seems cribbed from a CD of earnest finger-picking that one might find shelved at Starbuck's. This score too would play at the mall, between the smooth jazz numbers one often hears there, and perhaps it is meant therefore to relax those who might have trouble relaxing.

Yet Lee's adroitness with sound editing is such that the real score to Brokeback Mountain is the sound of wind. Lee loves silences, as a filmmaker. There is, for example, a sublime shot of Ennis's wife Alma (played with aching vulnerability by Michelle Williams) after she has accidentally witnessed her husband in a violent embrace with Jack. Alma never moves and there's nothing on the audio track but room tone. The sound of wind on the mountainside appears throughout the film, like a Wagnerian refrain, to remind us of the one place that these lovers feel it is safe to do what is most human.

The magnificent thing, though, that happens during the unravelling marriages of these two men, as the film hastens toward its heart-rending completion, is that you stop thinking of these men as men, or gay men, or whatever, and you start thinking about them only as human beings, people who long for something, for some kind of union they are never likely to have. The beautiful footage of the Rocky Mountains, the stunning emptiness of that landscape, does much to encourage this transformation of the story, this metamorphosis through which we come to regard two men delighting each other sexually in the mountains as being as natural as the landscape in which they find themselves.

Lee's Brokeback Mountain is a luminous, startling and sorrowful portrait of a love that truly can't be spoken of by its nearly wordless participants. As such, it is almost as affecting and classically sound as Romeo and Juliet. Therefore, it's not only important to see this film. To wrestle with its successes and mild imperfections is practically a civic duty of thinking persons, lest we should give in, the way Ennis Del Mar nearly does when he says ruefully to his beloved Jack: "If you can't fix it, you've gotta stand it."

Author Annie Proulx discusses the origins of her 'Brokeback Mountain'

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

December 15, 2005

LOS ANGELES -- Annie Proulx figured no magazine would touch her short story "Brokeback Mountain," the tale of two Wyoming cowboys whose romance is so intense it sometimes leaves them black and blue.

But The New Yorker published it in 1997, and it went on to win an O. Henry prize and a National Magazine Award. Now the movie version is a leading Oscar contender, with starring performances from Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist.

In a telephone conversation with The Associated Press from her home in Wyoming, Proulx, a 70-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner, declined to discuss the origins of her two roughneck lovers, citing an upcoming book written with screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. Instead, she spoke about homophobia, her fascination with rural life and the process of making Twist and Del Mar live and breathe.

AP: You've said 'Brokeback Mountain' began as an examination of homophobia in the land of the pure, noble cowboy.

Proulx: Everything I write has a rural situation and the Wyoming stories, in the collection 'Close Range,' which includes 'Brokeback Mountain,' did contain a number of those social-observation stories, what things are like for people there. It's my subject matter, what can I say.

AP: Were you trying to accomplish something specific with this story?

Proulx: No. It was just another story when I started writing it. I had no idea it was going to even end up on the screen. I didn't even think it was going to be published when I was first working on it because the subject matter was not in the usual ruts in the literary road.

AP: You've said this story took twice as long to write as a novel. Why?

Proulx: Because I had to imagine my way into the minds of two uneducated, rough-spoken, uninformed young men, and that takes some doing if you happen to be an elderly female person. I spent a great deal of time thinking about each character and the balance of the story, working it out, trying to do it in a fair kind of way.

AP: How did you feel about seeing it on the big screen?

Proulx: It was really quite a shock because I had had nothing to do with the film. So for 18 months, I had no idea what was happening. I had no idea if it was going to be good or frightful or scary, if it was going to be terribly lost or sentimentalized or what. When I saw it in September, I was astonished. The thing that happened while I was writing the story eight years ago is that from thinking so much about the characters and putting so much time into them, they became embedded in my consciousness. They became as real to me as real, walk-around, breathe-oxygen people. It took a long time to get these characters out of my head so I could get on with work. Then when I saw the film, they came rushing back. It was extraordinary, just wham, they were with me again.

AP: What did you think of the performances by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhall?

Proulx: I thought they were magnificent, both of them. Jake Gyllenhall's Jack Twist ... wasn't the Jack Twist that I had in mind when I wrote this story. The Jack that I saw was jumpier, homely. But Gyllenhall's sensitivity and subtleness in this role is just huge. The scenes he's in have a kind of quicksilver feel to them. Heath Ledger is just almost really beyond description as far as I'm concerned. He got inside the story more deeply than I did. All that thinking about the character of Ennis that was so hard for me to get, Ledger just was there. He did indeed move inside the skin of the character, not just in the shirt but inside the person. It was remarkable.

AP: Would you characterize the story as groundbreaking?

Proulx: I hope that it is going to start conversations and discussions, that it's going to awaken in people an empathy for diversity, for each other and the larger world. I'm really hoping that the idea of tolerance will come through discussions about the film. People tend to walk out of the theater with a sense of compassion, which I think is very fine. It is a love story. It has been called both universal and specific and I think that's true. It's an old, old story. We've heard this story a million times, we just haven't heard it quite with this cast.

AP: Have you gotten any response from gay organizations?

Proulx: No. When the story was first published eight years ago, I did expect that. But there was a deafening silence. What I had instead were letters from individuals, gay people, some of them absolutely heartbreaking. And over the years, those letters have continued and certainly are continuing now. Some of them are extremely fine, people who write and say, 'This is my story. This is why I left Idaho, Wyoming, Iowa.' Perhaps the most touching ones are from fathers, who say, 'Now I understand the kind of hell my son went through.' It's enormously wonderful to know that you've touched people, that you've truly moved them.

AP: Is that why you write?

Proulx: It's not why I write. I had no idea I was going to get any response of this sort. I wrote it from my long-term stance of trying to describe sections of rural life, individuals in particular rural situations and places, well, first the places. That it came out this way it just happened to touch certain nerves in people. I think this country is hungry for this story.

AP: Why?

Proulx: Because it's a love story and there's hardly much love around these days. I think people are sick of divisiveness, hate-mongering, disasters, war, loss and need and want a reminder that sometimes love comes along that is strong and permanent, and that it can happen to anyone.

AP: Do you think straight men will watch this movie?

Proulx: They are watching this movie. Of course, why wouldn't they watch it? Straight men fall in love. Not necessarily with each other or with a gay man. My son-in-law, who prides himself on being a Bud-drinking, NRA-member redneck, liked the movie so much he went to it twice. Straight men are seeing it and they're not having any problem with it. The only people who would have problems with it are people who are very insecure about themselves and their own sexuality and who would be putting up a defense, and that's usually young men who haven't figured things out yet. Ennis would probably have trouble with this movie.

AP: Do you think Jack and Ennis will come back?

Proulx: They're not coming back. There's no way. They're going to stay where they are. I've got other things to write.

Masculinity and Its Discontents in Marlboro Country

Everyone knows by now that "Brokeback Mountain" is "the gay cowboy movie." But it's much more than that.

By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: December 18, 2005

LESS than two weeks after its release, "Brokeback Mountain" is already on the verge of being embalmed in importance. A lightning rod for attention even before it opened, the film has earned plaudits from critics' groups along with predictable sneers, and provoked argument over its gay bona fides. That "Brokeback" is a landmark is a matter of empiricism; its merits as a work of art are a matter of taste. What has gone missing is that this is also that rare American film that seamlessly breaches the divide between the political and the personal, the past and the present. Here, against the backdrop of the great American West, that mythic territory of rugged individualism and the Marlboro Man, is a quietly devastating look at masculinity and its discontents.

Jack and Ennis, the lovers played by Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger, marry unhappily, but their wives pose far less of a real threat to their happiness and physical well-being than do other men - those overbearing fathers, bullying bosses, leery strangers and lead-pipe-wielding thugs who shadow their affair from start to heartbreaking end. On Brokeback Mountain, away from what Whitman called "the clank of the world," Jack and Ennis are free to follow their own (Whitman again) "paths untrodden." The mountain becomes their lost paradise, a realm of absolute freedom separate from the law, society and, most radically, the yoke of identity. On Brokeback, the two men are neither straight nor gay, much less queer; they are lovers, which probably accounts for the category confusion that has greeted the film.

That "Brokeback Mountain" quickly and jokingly became known as "the gay cowboy movie" speaks to the unease surrounding the film's subject, but it also reflects an unfamiliarity with both the West and the western. The image of the cowboy looms large in our popular imagination, even if the history of the actual cowboy was relatively short, having begun during the great cattle drives after the Civil War and ended as cattle were increasingly moved by rail. By the time the movies were invented, the era of the cowboy and the freedom he symbolizes was long over, but Hollywood, and later television and advertising, kept him alive in the collective consciousness, as have presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan.

In an interview in a Wyoming newspaper, Annie Proulx, who wrote the original story on which the Ang Lee film is based, corrected the common misconception about her two characters. "Excuse me," said Ms. Proulx, "but it is not a story about 'two cowboys.' It is a story about two inarticulate, confused Wyoming ranch kids in 1963 who have left home and who find themselves in a personal sexual situation they did not expect, do not understand, nor can manage." Jack and Ennis are not cowboys (if anything the two are shepherds), but they are, in Ms. Proulx's resonant words, "beguiled by the cowboy myth." It is a myth shaped as much by Hollywood as history, which is why when Ennis pushes his Stetson down to obscure his face, the gesture recalls nothing so much as James Dean pushing down his Stetson in the epic 1956 western "Giant."

The first time I watched "Brokeback Mountain" I thought of "Giant," initially because Mr. Gyllenhaal wears a mustache in the film meant to signify that Jack has reached middle age, but which instead makes the young actor look like a refugee from a high school production. The mustache reminds me of those scenes in "Giant" in which its two male stars, James Dean and Rock Hudson, wear silvered hair and painted-on wrinkles to suggest the passage of time. Hudson, who lived in the closet most of his life, and Dean, who may have lived there, too, were meant to look like the kinds of men who have weathered the years and its storms, conquered the land and, importantly, kept the covenant of the country -- and of Hollywood -- by falling in love with a woman, not with each other.

In "Brokeback Mountain," Jack and Ennis embody the classic western divide between nature and culture, their lives split between the freedom of the wilderness and the restrictions of the putatively civilized world they call home. Ms. Proulx's story opens long after the symbolic closing of the American frontier and six years before Stonewall, and delineates a new frontier that will soon change the country's social and political topography: gay rights. As Ms. Proulx has reminded interviewers, Matthew Shepard was murdered the year after her story was published. In the pop-culture fantasy of assimilation, gay men and lesbians are little more than fabulous accessories for straights, but Shepard's death and the debate over same-sex marriage are reminders that this frontier remains open.

James Dean was about the same age as Mr. Gyllenhaal when he made "Giant." It would be nice to think that if Dean and Hudson were alive today they would be out of their respective closets and would be enjoying the kind of marquee muscle that could get a project like "Brokeback Mountain" off the ground and into theaters. Well, it is a nice idea. Much like the West and the democratic ideal of the cowboy, which helped create the myth of the American frontier and the freedoms it was meant to represent, the movies create fantasies of liberation that don't always correspond to the world off-screen. In "Brokeback Mountain," Jack and Ennis cling to the myth of the cowboy because it offers a freedom that only really exists when they cling to each other, a freedom that remains contingent even now.

Cowboys, Just Like in the Movie

To some gay men in Wyoming, the emotional privation and brutal violence of "Brokeback Mountain" isn't just a story. It's a documentary.

By GUY TREBAY
Published: December 18, 2005
Lusk, Wyoming

THERE are missile silos tucked throughout the hills around the high plains here, a town 140 miles north of Cheyenne with more sheep than people, with one stop light, no bowling alley or movie theater and a year-round population just above 1,000. Although the silos, with their sinister nuclear payloads, are well concealed, most locals know where to find them. Wyoming's wide-open spaces are like that, with space enough to conceal wide-open secrets, and good reasons to do so.

Among the secrets is the existence of gay cowboys, a term that might have struck some as an oxymoron before Ang Lee's new film, "Brokeback Mountain," which opened earlier this month to sold-out houses in New York and Los Angeles, seven Golden Globe nominations and almost universally rave reviews. By the standards of the rhapsodically spare film and the bleak Annie Proulx story on which it is based, gay cowboys are so anomalous as to be characters out of myth.

Yet there has always lurked a suspicion that the fastidious Eastern dude of Owen Wister's "The Virginian" harbored stronger than proper feelings for his rough Western compadres, and that the Red River crowd may have gotten up to more than yarning by the campfire whenever Joanne Dru was not around. The light Ang Lee allows into the bunkhouse closet may shock those who like their Marlboro Men straight.

But to gay men trying to forge lives in a world where the shape of masculinity is narrow, and where the "liberated" antics of the homosexual minstrels so often depicted on television can seem far off, the emotional privation and brutal violence of "Brokeback Mountain" seems like documentary.

"That could have been my life," Derrick Glover said one bitter cold afternoon last week, referring to the film, which he had seen at a special screening a week before in Jackson, Wyo. A 33-year-old rancher, Mr. Glover comes from a family that has worked the land around Lusk for generations. His father still runs 300 head of cattle.

Seated at a table in the smoky Outpost Cafe alongside Highway 85, Mr. Glover laid out the story of a typical ranch-country boyhood: herding, branding, culling and haying, horses hobbled on picket lines and calves pulled forcibly from their mother's bodies during spring calving. Every summer Mr. Glover sets out with his brother in a panel truck carrying their two quarter horses, to compete in calf and steer roping competitions. "I never had any intention of leaving the cowboy lifestyle," Mr. Glover said. "Ranching is who I am."

Yet next month Mr. Glover will quit Lusk and that part of himself in order to move to the bright lights of Lander, Wyo. (population 6,864). "I don't really want to do it," Mr. Glover said. Yet he has to, he explained, if he ever wants to live his life openly. Like Jack Twist, the rodeo-loving character portrayed by Jake Gyllenhaal in the movie, Derrick Glover is gay.

"They always define it as coming out of the closet, but I don't consider myself to be out of the closet," Mr. Glover explained. There is a reason for that, he said. "Where I live, you can't really go out and be yourself. You couldn't go out together, two guys, as a couple and ever be accepted. It wasn't accepted in the past, it's still not, and I don't think it ever will be." That he and some of the others interviewed for this article were willing to be named and photographed was not without social and even physical risk.

Starkest among the dimensions of "Brokeback Mountain" is not the love story billboarded as revolutionary, or the kisses that are far less erotically charged than the one exchanged by Peter Finch and Murray Head in John Schlesinger's "Sunday Bloody Sunday," back in 1971.

What is most emotionally corrosive about "Brokeback Mountain," some say, is the film's placid portrayal of the violence that has always been a part of gay experience, whether a gay man's brutal murder recalled in flashback from the boyhood of Ennis del Mar, the conflicted cowboy portrayed by Heath Ledger, or the equally grotesque killing that is the film's denouement. Just as chilling, perhaps, is the emotional wreckage left littering the majestic landscape, hulks of lives ruptured by intolerance and misunderstanding left rusting at the end of dirt roads.

If there is an unacknowledged spirit hanging over "Brokeback Mountain" surely it is Matthew Shepard, the 21-year old University of Wyoming student who was attacked on Oct, 6, 1998, outside Laramie, pistol whipped by two young assailants he had met at a bar, tied to a split-rail fence with his own sneaker laces and left to die in the cold.

Mr. Shepard's murderers, as is well known, were quickly arrested. They were tried in an atmosphere of freak show theater, replete with antigay protesters calling down fire and brimstone at Mr. Shepard's funeral, and supporters dressed as angels who formed a palisade to block the hatemongers from view.

The killers, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, were convicted of felony murder, kidnapping and, in Mr. McKinney's case, aggravated robbery and were given double life sentences. And Mr. Shepard's death soon assumed the moral and symbolic dimensions of martyrdom.

His story became a rallying point for a nascent gay rights movement in Wyoming, and the basis for a theatrical epic, "The Laramie Project."

"The Shepard thing goes through my mind all the time," Mr. Glover said flatly, idly tugging on the brim of his farm cap. "People think that could never happen again," he added. "It could happen. It will happen."

Others here insist otherwise, however; they say life for gay men in Wyoming has improved in substantial ways from the era Mr. Ang depicts, the early 60's through the early 80's. They point to the prominence of gay rights groups like Wyoming Equality, to the openly gay mayor of Casper, Wyo., and to the Link, a support group for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered youth.

"It's improved in some ways, but not in others," said Curtis Mork, the coordinator of Wyoming Equality, based in the state capital, Cheyenne. "But the thing about being gay in Wyoming is that you have to know people in order to be out. In San Francisco if you raise your hand and say 'I'm gay,' there'll be a hundred people saying, 'Me too.' Here, unless people know it's safe, you're basically alone. You really can't come out."

When Mr. Ledger's character defiantly asserts, "I ain't queer," following a drunken coupling with Mr. Gyllenhaal's character in their sheepherder's tent, it seems clear that as much as he fears the loss of his cowboy machismo, he is equally scared to relinquish his physical safety once the two come down from Brokeback Mountain.

"I grew up with that same kind of fear and conflict," Ben Clark, a fourth- generation rancher from Jackson said on Tuesday. "Growing up, I never even dreamed that a real cowboy would be gay," Mr. Clark added. It is a belief in which he is not alone.

Last week Janice Crouse, a senior fellow of the conservative group Concerned Women for America, charged Mr. Lee's movie not only with promoting a "homosexual lifestyle" but with subverting a sacred American symbol. "Their major agenda is to make this normal," Ms. Crouse told Reuters after the film's premiere, referring to homosexuality. "They know cowboys have this macho image, cowboys are particularly admired by children. Cowboys are heroes."

Cowboys are indeed heroes admired by children, even by those raised to be cowboys and yet with the uneasy sense that the job will probably not be open to their kind. "I awakened to my same-sex attraction when I was 12," said Mr. Clark, who is now 42. "But I had no idea what to do about it, ever. I was raised in a ranching, rodeo world - wrangling, packing horses, riding bucking stock, working in hunting camps - but always with the sense that I had to conceal who I was because cowboys could never be gay."

The experience was "extremely, extremely lonely," Mr. Clark said, leaving him feeling so isolated that he more than once contemplated suicide. "I could not accept being gay because of the stereotypes that were drilled into me," he explained. "Gay men are emotionally weak. They are not real men. They are like women."

Like Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist in the film, Mr. Clark dated women for a time, bowing to the pressure to be "normal" although, unlike them, he never married and led a double life. There's a joke out here about how one goes about finding a gay man on the frontier. The punch line is deadpan: "Look for the wife and kids."

Fortunately, Mr. Clark said, "I never did get married, because I never wanted to hurt a woman like that." Yet there was much in the film he could relate to, said Mr. Clark, who is among a handful of people in Wyoming to have seen the movie, which has yet to find an exhibitor in the state.

"When I was in my 20's, I worked in a hunting camp for three years as a wrangler," Mr. Clark said. "I heard the jokes, but I kept my feelings inside. One of the hunters asked me, 'Have you been married before?' I told him no. And he gave me a look and said, 'Most of the guys who aren't married by now are getting involved with being hairdressers.' "

Mr. Clark was not be the only person in Wyoming who pointed out the prevalence in local Internet gay chat rooms of men who are not "queers" but who constitute a population of "men who have sex with men but do not identify as gay," a designation arrived at by epidemiologists struggling with ways to track the vectors of sexually transmitted disease.

"There is probably a fair amount of that going on," said Joe Corrigan, a quiet-spoken Cheyenne hairdresser who 15 years ago helped start an annual summer campout for gay men in the Medicine Bow National Forest. The Rendezvous - named for 19th-century gatherings of mountain men, trappers and assorted frontier oddballs - went on to become an institution of Wyoming gay life.

"It's fun for people to have the opportunity to be ourselves and forget about fears," said Mr. Corrigan, quickly adding that there is probably less reason than there used to be for gay men here to be fearful. "Matthew Shepard was an anomaly," he said. "I think that once this film opens here, if it ever does, it will open a lot of people's eyes."

And yet even activists like Mr. Corrigan and his partner, a government employee, concede that tolerance can seem provisional and that gays may be welcome in Wyoming, but typically with the proviso that they are not "Will & Grace" gay.

"I know there are a lot of gay guys in Cheyenne, and it's pretty much accepted, in a way," said Julie Tottingham, the manager of Corral West Ranchwear in Cheyenne, the city's largest purveyor of boot-cut Wranglers, ostrich-skin Tony Lamas and broad-brim buffalo-felt Stetsons. "But at the same time, a lot of our customers would be offended if a gay guy was in here shopping," Ms. Tottingham said. "They'd feel it's an insult to the cowboy way of life."

Among the locals who got an opportunity to see the movie at the screening in Jackson was Jade Beus, an openly gay former cowboy raised on a sheep ranch in Soda Springs, Idaho. "I had more or less that same experience," said Mr. Beus, referring to the characters' struggles. "Trying to find self-acceptance literally took me to a place where I thought I was such a bad person I once put a pistol to the roof of my mouth."

Mr. Beus, who now owns a heating and plumbing contracting company, is not certain what it was that prevented him from taking his own life. "But something clicked over," he said. "I believe greatly in a higher power and I realized He dealt me this particular hand," Mr. Beus said. "I'm a man's man. I'm not feminine at all. Other people might slander me for who I am, but I made a decision a long time ago that I'm not going through life hating myself because I love men."

Brokeback Mountain / Reviewed by Jeremy C. Fox

For a lot of people I know, both gay and straight, Brokeback Mountain is the most anticipated film of the year. Since it was first announced in 2003, it’s generally been known as “that gay cowboy movie”— the film in which, for the first time, two handsome Hollywood stars on the rise would appear in an honest-to-God gay romance, the movie that would give us both the love that dare not speak its name and the sex scenes that Tom Hanks (in Philadelphia) and Colin Farrell (in both A Home at the End of the World and Alexander) dare not shoot — but calling Brokeback Mountain “that gay cowboy movie” is about as reductive as calling The Godfather “that mafia movie.” It contains aspects of Westerns, gay coming-of-age films, and romantic melodramas, but to apply a facile label would be to underestimate its majestic sweep and its heartening and heartrending depth. It is, at its base, a film about the conflict between what a man is and what he needs.

The movie’s source is the final story in Annie Proulx’s book Close Range: Wyoming Stories, a collection of narratives about difficult lives lived in difficult circumstances by people who mostly don’t expect better. Her characters tend to be of two types: the dreamers who either buy into the romance of the West or can’t wait to escape it and the realists who accept their lot with stoic resilience. Brokeback Mountain has one of each: Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), starry-eyed and caught up in heroic myths, and Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) a pragmatist who just lives his life the only way he knows how. In outline, the film is simple: Boy gets boy; boy loses boy; boy gets and loses boy over and over again across a lifetime — but there’s a whole world of suffering and grief in all that getting and losing, a permanent sense of loss, of possibilities forever forestalled, happiness perpetually found and then denied, lessons learned too late.

Over the past year or so, Heath Ledger has been involved in a project of rejiggering his career, eschewing the fluffy, audience-pleasing “blond-haired bimbo” roles that made him famous and saying f**k you to the Hollywood establishment, taking flaky character parts or leads that other young actors considered too risky. Here he confirms a suspicion that I developed after seeing Lords of Dogtown last summer and realizing that he’d played a sizable role without my ever recognizing him — he’s a startlingly gifted actor. He’s playing a character who’s superficially a throwback to the days of John Wayne and Gary Cooper, and he outwardly embodies the quintessential Western hero, squinting his eyes into black creases and murmuring his words through drawn lips, with an accent that’s a little bit Billy Bob Thornton in Sling Blade and a little bit Sam Elliott in everything (though with a lighter timbre). But Ennis doesn’t have it in him to be an icon. Having lost his parents as a child, he was early prepared for a hard life full of disappointments; he’s uncomplaining and compliant, willing to work any shit-job he can get, willing to perform any task unquestioningly.

While Ennis begins the film shambling like a young man whom life has already beaten, Jack struts around like a stud horse, intoxicated with the idea of being a rodeo star and proving his worth to his disapproving father and, by extension, the world. Gyllenhaal’s performance at first seems a little out of place; everyone around him (at this point, essentially Ledger, Randy Quaid, and some sheep) seems entirely at ease and unactorish, but on a second viewing I realized that what I was watching wasn’t Gyllenhaal’s performance — it was Jack’s. Jack is constantly trying to fill the role of Western hero, trying to impress; when we first see him, waiting with Ennis outside Joe Aguirre’s trailer-office, he leans against his truck in an exaggeratedly casual posture, with a “hey, cowboy” leer. The pose seems tentative here, but when he strikes it again later, after he knows he’s won Ennis, it’s triumphant. Unlike Ennis, Jack knows what he wants and is willing to go after it, though he may be only a little better at understanding it.

Ennis and Jack first meet in Signal, Wyoming, in 1963, when they take summer jobs tending sheep on Brokeback Mountain for Joe Aguirre (Quaid). Up on Brokeback, they endure harsh weather, minimal provisions, and predator attacks on the sheep, and gradually, over a period of days and weeks, they reveal themselves to each other and become close. When a night of too much whiskey and too much cold confines them to the same small tent, Jack, who’s clearly had it on his mind for a while, makes his move and they consummate their relationship. Early reports on the film suggested that the physical affection between Ennis and Jack would be downplayed; that perhaps they wouldn’t even kiss onscreen, but this encounter is treated no more or less gingerly than their later encounters with women. There’s no ambiguity about the sex, no discreet fade to black, but neither is it played for titillation or shock value. The connection between Ennis and Jack is powerful, even elemental, and sex is what cements it, a factor it would be dishonest to exclude, but there’s far more to it than that. Ennis gives Jack the tenderness and affection that he craves, offers him the acceptance that his father denied him, but what Jack gives Ennis is understanding; he’s the one person in the world around whom Ennis can drop his guard, though even with Jack it falls only so far. But what this relationship means to them, the powerful hold they have over each other, is something they have little means to express. Like many men, their feelings come out most clearly through aggression. The physical violence between Ennis and Jack is more than just a metaphor for the emotional violence of their connection, it’s the only way these inarticulate men are able to express the strength of their feelings. Though it’s tacitly clear in their every interaction, and though they often speak of the grip “this thing” has on them, throughout the film’s two and a quarter hours neither dares to say the word “love.”

Like many a homosexual encounter, theirs begins in drunkenness, when their inhibitions are lowered, and like many people after their first homosexual encounter, Ennis would like to believe that it’s a fluke, no big deal. “This is a one-shot thing we got goin’ on here. … You know I ain’t queer,” he tells Jack the next afternoon, hoping and perhaps still believing that it’s true. Ennis plays the “masculine” role and tries to preserve his image of himself as a man. He tries to separate sex from emotion, to convince himself that Jack is no more to him than a vehicle for his sexual drive, a partner better suited to the purpose than his hand but only marginally preferable to the sheep. Initially he can’t admit to himself that he’s getting anything more from Jack than a sexual release; when Jack wants to be treated as a lover, an equal, to be kissed and to be held, Ennis is terrified of the implicit suggestion that indeed he is queer, of surrendering his masculine prerogative, of assuming an ambiguous role. But need and regard for Jack overpower his fears and he relents. When the sheep-tending job is ending and they must separate, the full force of Ennis’ emotion comes down on him and he’s wrecked.

Ennis returns home and marries his sweetheart Alma (Michelle Williams), attempting to return to his old life with little success. Separated from Jack, he tries to make a Jack of Alma, wrestling with her in the snow as he’d wrestled with Jack up on Brokeback, too rough for a woman half his size, assigning her the sexual role Jack had assumed eagerly but which she accepts with grim marital devotion. Ennis becomes a caring father and he loves Alma as best he can, but his unfulfilled desires isolate him from his family. As the years pass, he increasingly draws away from them.

Jack moves to Texas for rodeoing but has little success. Though he’s drawn to men and looks for opportunities for hookups, he’s impressed when he meets a pretty young barrel-racer named Lureen Newsome (Anne Hathaway), though it’s suggested that her family’s wealth may have as much to do with her appeal as her personal charms. They marry and settle in Childress, Texas, where they both work for Lureen’s father, a big-time farm-equipment dealer. After four years have passed since that summer on the mountain, Jack finally heads back up to Wyoming and finds Ennis. When they meet again, their passion overtakes them, and they resume their relationship, planning several hunting or fishing trips a year so that they can be together, Jack driving 14-hour stretches at every opportunity to spend time alone with Ennis.

Ledger and Gyllenhaal inhabit their characters with powerful realism. As the years pass, the actors age subtly but persuasively. Jack grows a Dennis Weaver moustache and develops a beer gut; Ennis, who seemed old even when he was young, changes only in the hardening of his face, his skin growing more dry and taut, getting crepey around the eyes. The makeup artists have done great work here, but it’s Ledger and Gyllenhaal who have to carry these scenes off, and they do so admirably. Even in the latter part of the film, when Ledger is playing father to a young woman who can’t be more than six or seven years his junior, you don’t question it.

For those who care about a film adaptation’s faithfulness to its literary forerunner, the situation of Brokeback Mountain’s production — adapting a brief but thematically rich and emotionally resonant story — is perhaps ideal. The nature of film — its reliance on the visual and the active over the contemplative, its necessary brevity — makes it almost impossible to do full justice to a novel, but a short story doesn’t make such demands on a screenwriter. Rather than reducing or eliminating themes and events, he can use what was in the original and expand upon it, taking ideas that were only hinted at and exploring them at greater length, bringing out new meanings and enriching existing ones. This is what Brokeback Mountain’s screenwriters, Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, have done; they know that Proulx’s story wasn’t broke, and they don’t try to fix it. They simply take it and allow it to sprawl out, to fill up the edges of the film with carefully observed details. McMurtry, a Texan and author of both contemporary and period novels and screenplays about the West, understands this world as well as anyone might; Ossana has lived much of her life in New Mexico and Arizona and has collaborated with McMurtry on novels and screenplays for over a decade. Their elaborations on Proulx’s story are keyed perfectly to her pitch. They’ve made the chronology more linear — an esthetically neutral decision in this case — but nothing of substance is missing, while some useful context and character motivations are added. They expand the story into other points of view, strengthening Proulx’s insights, giving a greater sense of the impact that Ennis and Jack’s love has on those around them, and adding such small but meaningful touches as a brown paper sack offered at just the right moment.

This is the first film Ang Lee has directed since Hulk, and he seems to have learned from that considerable misfire. He’s playing to his strengths here, and they are remarkable. Like many of the canniest observers of American life, Lee is an outsider who has adopted the American culture and who continues to see our society with a clearer eye than we may have ourselves. A native of Taiwan who has lived much of his adult life in the United States, Lee is adept at immersing himself in new cultures (New York Times critic Stephen Holden once called him “a kind of cinematic anthropologist”), recreating the world of his characters and examining it with a thoughtful, critical eye without resorting to parody. Lee has sometimes been accused of being too clinical, of keeping his subjects at an objective distance, but there’s none of that here. His empathy with these characters — each of them trapped in his or her own particular way — is palpable, yet he never tips over into sentimentality or lugubriousness.

Lee and his cinematographer, the versatile Rodrigo Prieto (21 Grams, Alexander), capture the feeling that runs through all of Proulx’s Wyoming stories, a sense of the permanence of the land and the transience of individual human lives. Their Wyoming (played with picture-postcard beauty by Alberta, Canada) is a painterly landscape of craggy mountains; rich, verdant grasslands; and a gorgeous, endless sky above, that serves as half of a metaphor for the characters’ dual lives; it’s the idyllic Eden where Ennis and Jack first meet and later find temporary escape, the place they can be together and be themselves without fear of judgment, contrasted against the constricted feel of the dusty, squalid cow towns and tacky, middle-class, southwestern suburbs where they spend most of their lives.

Lee takes the classic contrast between nature and civilization and uses it in a new way, as an implicit argument that the love between Ennis and Jack is a natural thing subverted by the arbitrary rules and definitions of manhood of their society. This might sound pretentious, and in many other hands it could be, but the beauty of Lee’s technique is its simplicity, its directness and lack of pretense, its ability to suggest without overplaying. He’s assisted by the somber elegance of Gustavo Santaolalla’s guitar-and-fiddle score, which evokes Country-Western music without quite entering its twangy domain and fits the moods Lee creates without overselling them.

Brokeback Mountain bears some similarities to Lee’s 1993 film The Wedding Banquet, in which a gay Chinese man living in New York with his lover must get himself a nice Chinese wife to appease his traditional parents back in Taiwan. Lee isn’t gay, but in films like The Wedding Banquet, Sense and Sensibility, The Ice Storm, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon he’s shown an understanding of gay men and straight women — the disenfranchised of patriarchies — that’s greater than just about any other straight male director I can think of; as much as I admire Gus Van Sant (who is gay and who at one point expressed interest in directing Brokeback Mountain) I can’t imagine anyone doing this story better. As far as I know, none of the principals involved in the production is gay, yet they’ve constructed a story of love between men that surpasses all but the greatest films made by gay filmmakers, such as Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho. Lee’s fascinated with people whose desires are thwarted by the strictures of society and the sacrifices demanded by tradition. And, in America, no tradition is more venerable than the notion of the laconic, stalwart western hero, the icon that Jack wishes he were and that Ennis falls to by dint of circumstance. It’s part of Ennis’ appeal to Jack that he embodies the cowboy archetype Jack aspires to.

Lee’s aware that he’s playing with myth, but he doesn’t muck about with it capriciously. Westerns are always about the end of a way of life, and Lee seems ambivalent about the changes that time has wrought. If Ennis and Jack were 20 years old in 2003 rather than 1963, their relationship would be easier but the West they knew would be gone. Brokeback Mountain uses the West as a backdrop, but it’s not structured like a Western, and it’s not intended as a criticism of the genre like McCabe and Mrs. Miller or Unforgiven, films that took the Western hero and made him either a buffoon or a sociopath; rather it’s a film that employs selected genre elements for their resonances, their associations. The mythic quality of the landscape and the lonesome figures moving through it only serves to emphasize the difficulty of these men playing the roles they’ve been given, the impossibility of living up to a myth.

The filmmakers have the guts to allow for the moral ambiguity of Ennis and Jack’s situation and explore the toll their secret takes on their families. No matter how powerful or natural their desires, by following them they’re hurting the women they married in their misdirected search for the passion they find only with each other. While I’d enjoyed Michelle Williams’ performances in small roles in recent films like Imaginary Heroes and The Baxter, until now my concept of her was essentially “that girl from ‘Dawson’s Creek.’” Those days are over. Her performance here is so deeply felt, authentic, and adult that it wipes away all my preconceived notions about her — not to mention blowing her former co-star Katie Holmes, whose recent performances haven’t strayed far from the Creek, right out of the water. When Williams’ Alma first witnesses her husband embracing a man, kissing him, her face expresses about 10 kinds of alarm, confusion, heartbreak, and horror. And Anne Hathaway, who plays Jack’s wife Lureen, might have forever been Mia Thermopolis to me but for her role here. She’s given less to play than Williams, but she makes the most of every moment. Her silent triumph when Jack finally stands up to her bullying father is exhilarating, and the slight catch in her throat that disturbs her frosty demeanor when she speaks to Ennis for the first and last time, the subtle suggestion that she’s finally learned her husband’s secret, completely transforms the way we see her character. Even the actors in roles that count for little more than cameos, such as the tiny part played by an unrecognizable Anna Faris, or the slightly larger role given to Linda Cardellini, hit home. It’s as if Lee had been asked to prove that every B-list actress in Hollywood under 30 had unplumbed depths. There’s not a performer in the film who doesn’t stretch (well, maybe Randy Quaid, but it’s nice to see him in a respectable role again), and there’s not one who fails.

Lee is aware of his film’s place in the world, that no one will approach it as just a romance and that much more attention will be given it than if the actors were nobodies, and his approach is, I think, the best possible one, low-key and matter-of-fact, making the story feel genuine and simple and true. Brokeback Mountain is a film of great subtlety and precise observation, a film for which the best descriptors are words like “rich” and “authentic” and, possibly, “perfect.” After three viewings and some careful consideration, I’m damned if I can find a significant flaw. There are one or two lines of dialogue that I might change, and Gyllenhaal’s early scenes made more sense to me upon the second viewing, but these are quibbles. In a medium where the important decisions are almost always dictated by commerce rather than art, Brokeback Mountain is as close to perfection as we are likely to get.

The following was written by my friend Tom --

It's been fascinating reading all of the talk about Brokeback on the internet. One thing's for sure, this film has got people talking in a way that few films ever have. I honestly think it's one of those watershed moments in movie history when the film enters into and becomes a part of the culture.

Every time I see a picture of Ennis and Jack I'm so moved I have to stop and sort of gather my wits about me again. This is a haunting movie for me, for a lot of different reasons. This story is my story, almost from beginning to end. Even the details feel like they were lifted from the pages of my life. It's weird in a way but it's also wonderful.

Climbing Brokeback Mountain...

A lot of people are either talking or writing about Brokeback Mountain, especially now since it was released in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles on Dec. 9th and has received seven Golden Globe nominations along with setting new box-office records and winning top awards in festivals everywhere it's been shown. I'd thought that my brief comments about it shortly after seeing the movie would be enough, but Annie Proulx's story about Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar is lingering persistently in my thoughts.

I've been following the talk about this movie since it was first announced that it had been cast and was finally being made. I guess I share the same desire as many others in the gay community to have our stories not just told, but told well and I was holding my breath hoping that Brokeback Mountain would deliver on its formidable promise. Well, it did deliver and did it in a far more meaningful way than I could have anticipated.

The world of cinema occasionally gives us stories we can sink our teeth into, feel good about and relate to even when they're heartbreaking or difficult to watch. As cliched as it might seem, the British film Maurice from Merchant-Ivory was the first time that I realized that there were moviemakers with big budgets willing to dig deep and share our experiences with stories and characters that resonate more closely to home for many of us. The broadly drawn caricatured stereotypes that are so prevalent in our entertainment culture have their value but often fail to tell the whole story of who we are and where we've been.

Given the limited audience for films that explore the gay experience it's understandable why there's limited budgets for making films on the level of Maurice. Even so, many filmmakers have managed to bring us wonderfully crafted stories on shoestring budgets. I've often wondered what would happen if more of these gifted moviemakers got lucky enough to have some serious money to work with and were able to tell one of our stories without having to do it on a buck fifty.

Brokeback Mountain answered that question for me in much the same way that many smaller budgeted films have; It isn't so much about the money being spent on the film but the skill and the caring being invested by those who make the films.

Would Latter Days have been a better film had CJ Cox had the money to hire bigger stars than Steve Sandvoss and Wes Ramsey? (Somehow it's hard to imagine any better casting.) Could Big Eden have been any more intimate and charming had there been a few more million dollars behind it? And what about Beautiful Thing? Would a bigger budget have allowed it to soar any higher than it did? It seems to me that it's not just about the money or none of these films would have succeeded as beautifully as they did.

In Brokeback Mountain there's a scene in which Ennis takes Jack's shirt from an empty closet and holds it against his face. The heartbreaking poignancy of that moment offers up an emotion that transcends the limitations of sexuality and gender and gives all of us equal access to the universally understood experience of losing someone we love. Regardless of who we love, all of us bend under the same weight of loss.

That moment in the film, like many others, didn't need a mountain of money behind it to make it work. All it needed, and what it had, was gifted storytellers and fearless moviemakers who were willing to tell the story the way it was written rather than try and clean it up for a broader audience. Brokeback Mountain has the look and feel of a big budget movie but in scene after scene it brings us right back to the heart of its story and keeps us quietly focused there, which isn't something that money can buy unless the moviemakers have it in them to begin with.

The intimate and sometimes achingly painful story of Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar in Brokeback Mountain hasn't been sanitized - it's there, not gussied up and not dressed down but offered to us the way Annie Proulx wrote it. And that in my mind is one of the reasons why Brokeback Mountain works so well - because it's true to Proulx's depiction of ordinary people dealing with love the best they can.

Having more money to work with perhaps gave director Ang Lee the luxury of more takes, more time to get it right, more money to spend on locations, lighting, interior details, authenticity in costuming and more second-unit cinematography. But I don't believe it was the money he had to spend that kept the story so close to its heart - I think it was his willingness to tell the story the way it was written and the willingness of his actors to step into and completely inhabit their character's lives that did it. Big budgets can't buy that kind of moviemaking - it has to come from the storyteller's hearts.

Brokeback Mountain then is a potent combination of both talented storytellers and a sizeable budget. I'm guessing that these guys could have made a great film without all of that money but I doubt that all of that money would have given us what this film does without Ang Lee and his team of gifted storytellers. It's nice to see all of it all in the same place at the same time for a change.

"Brokeback Mountain got us good..."

So much is being written about Brokeback Mountain at this point that I fear falling into redundancy trying to articulate my feelings about it. I have to say that out of all of the dozens of reviews and commentaries I've read about it, Jeremy C. Fox's review stands out as being so particularly insightful and so eloquently written that it feels like there isn't much left to say after reading it. But there is a lot more that's going to be said because more and more people are seeing the movie and feeling its impact.

The nerve that's being touched with Brokeback Mountain is of such a universal nature that some have tried to say it's not really a gay movie at all. And they wouldn't really be wrong in that assessment because the story of Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar reaches so far into the collective human heart that virtually all of us get caught up its net. The feeling of loving this deeply and experiencing such profound frustration and loss isn't unique to any one group of people. If you have ever loved beyond your ability to stop it or found yourself falling to your knees and retching over the agony of loss then you will see yourself in these guys. Jack and Ennis are more than just two men who have fallen in love, they're all of us. And Brokeback Mountain is a film that lets us know that and feel it in a way that perhaps no other film has done before.

But it's still a story about two men in love so we can't really remove the word gay from the equation because that's the word that we use these days to most easily and succinctly refer to men who love other men. I do believe however that Brokeback Mountain is going to help us get beyond the labels and begin to understand more fully the universality of loving, regardless of who it is we love.

There is absolutely no shying away here from the fact that these guys are sexual and that they're expressing it in the most primal of ways. But the emotions they're feeling and the burden of trying to live lives away from their cores are themes that transcend our carefully guarded paradigms. So yes, Brokeback Mountain has a gay storyline if you will, but at the same time it's so much more than gay. And that's the wave that I think a lot of people are being carried along on right now. Regardless of who we have sex with, the story of Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar hits home. We know those feelings, we know that kind of all-consuming desire, we know what it means to ache for someone we can't have or can't be with. The story is about two men in love but its resonance is felt in a far broader context. We have to give this film that space and not get caught up in the semantics or we risk losing what's meaningful about it.

I've wondered over and over where it is that Annie Proulx found these characters in her experience. Was she once in love with or married to a gay man? Were men like Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar her friends? Or did she just get lucky and nail it because the stars and the planets were all arranged just so during the time she was writing the story? However she got to it, she got to it and landed her characters with unflinching and unnerring accuracy. The love shared between two men can sometimes be rough and she got it right. Men can hold each other with amazing gentleness and she got that right too. Everything she touched in this story seems to resonate with immense knowing and insight. A woman seeing this far into the hearts and minds of men who love other men is something I haven't experienced since Patricia Nell Warren's The Frontrunner.

Maybe what's happened is that Proulx and Warren have applied their own personal knowing and experience to men, and in so doing helped us see that our differences are more perceptions than they are realities. There is a very intimate and resonant understanding of how men love each other going on in the story of Jack and Ennis in Brokeback Mountain. Proulx didn't just dance on the edge of the fire here, she walked across it, stopped in the middle and let herself be consumed by it and then somehow walked on out to the other side and sat down and wrote her story.

I think that sometimes those of us who are gay, are seduced by the nature of these often very difficult lives we live into thinking that our experience is so different and so unique to us that nobody but one of us could ever understand it, much less write about it or portray it with any accuracy. Annie Proulx and Patricia Nell Warren have shown us that there at least a few people out there who know and understand what's going on and are capable of not just telling our stories but telling them well.

I've seen Brokeback Mountain twice now and both times was amazed at how Jack and Ennis' experiences so closely mirrored my own and how accurately those experiences reflected not only the broad strokes of my life but the nuanced ones as well. I was twenty when I first fell in love with another guy and there was nothing in my world that could have prepared me for what that was, what it meant or the impact it would eventually have in my life. The word gay didn't exist for me nor did I know that there was such a thing as being able to be in love with another man. But there it was, out of the blue one day, much in the same way for me as it was for Ennis Del Mar - something so powerful and all-consuming that I had no choice but to go with it. Like Ennis, I left my Brokeback Mountain and went back to the life I thought I was supposed to live; the only option I thought was available to me then. But someone had a hold on my heart and the soaring happiness I had known in his arms up there on our mountain haunted me, right on through a marriage that I tried so hard to make work.

Between Proulx's story, Lee's directing and Ledger and Gyllenhaal's acting a good chunk of my life's story has been told in achingly painful detail. None of them missed a beat nor did they shy away from the tough stuff. It's all right there as if they'd borrowed the most intimate details from my heart. But I know that it's not just my experience - it's so much bigger than that and seeing this movie and reading people's responses to it has helped me realize that when it comes to love we all seem to be sharing a common thread. Our uniqueness is in the details but so is that intangible something that makes us all so very much alike. Brokeback Mountain helps us understand that by stepping quietly away from the stereotypes and sticking closely to what's going on in Jack and Ennis' hearts.

There is much to be lauded in Brokeback Mountain and though it embarasses me a little to be carrying on this way about a film, I'll do it because, to paraphrase something Jack said to Ennis, "Brokeback Mountain got me good."

i am looking forward to seeing this when it comes out here on boxing day australia (26th). It looks like a lush crisp lanscape film with a passionate series of intimate portraits. I saw an interview with Ang Lee on television. That man can do anything (well maybe lets just skip Hulk for now). I will definately go to the cinemas and see this and probably drag whoever I can to go along with me

So many beautiful, profound things have been written about BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN. Here are some more.

Andrew Sullivan --

I saw it last night. As you'd expect with Ang Lee, the movie has enormous integrity. Heath Ledger is magnificent in his indirection -- this is a rare movie in which the anguish of the outwardly conforming, "straight-acting" gay man is exposed in all its raw pain. Three scenes remain in my mind. There's a shot after the two men leave each other for the first time when Ennis [Ledger] stays upright and walks nonchalantly as his lover drives away. But then, as soon as his beloved is out of sight, he collapses in emotional pain, punching a wall in agony, even then having to deflect the suspicion of a stranger. The moment when they reunite -- its passion, its need, its depth -- ravishes with insight into what love truly is. Then there's the scene when Ennis' wife finally confronts him -- and you can see the damage done to so many lives by the powerful, suffocating evil of homophobia. So many lives. Sometimes I start to imagine how much accumulated human pain has been inflicted for so many centuries on so many gay hearts and souls, and then I stop. It's too much. We are slowly healing; but some wounds will never heal, and they are inscribed on the souls of millions in the past -- the ones who persecuted, the ones who suffered, the ones who never let themselves be loved -- or saw it briefly once, feared it and lived their lives in the lengthening shadow of their regrets. Yes, these were souls whose backs were broken. And now a new generation stands up.

Eat Drink Man Man: "Brokeback Mountain"

This week, the Film Geek's Guide's Matt Singer and the IFC Blog's Alison Willmore try to scale Ang Lee's cowboy romance "Brokeback Mountain." It won't be pretty...okay, maybe it will be.

Matt: The movies have always idealized the American West. The frontier may have been dirty and violent, but it was also a place of values, honor, heroism, and natural beauty. What's particularly interesting about Ang Lee's "Brokeback Mountain" is the way it upholds this idealized West while completely unsettling one of its basic tenets. For sheepherders Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) the West is a place like the one we've seen in many movies, but it is also the place -- the only place, really -- where the two of them can carry on a passionate love affair.

The two meet in 1963, and spend a summer tending to a flock on the titular Wyoming mountain where life looks a lot like it did in 1863; the pair eat a lot of beans, make a lot of campfires, and are totally isolated from the modern world. When the summer ends so does their affair, and they go their separate ways. Both return to civilization, marry women and start families (with Michelle Williams' Alma and Anne Hathaway's Lureen). Four years later, the two reunite and pick up exactly where they left off. Every couple of months for the next several decades the pair meets for secretive "fishing trips" where they are free to be together. Only in the wilderness, in the perfect, innocent West, are they permitted to be together.

Alison: And Ennis and Jack are such archetypal cowboy figures -- Jack the hotshot, loudmouth rodeo rider who in any older Western would be labeled "The Kid"; and Ennis, muttering, closed-off Ennis, already well on his way to being a grizzled old loner by the end of the film. The movie cowboy has always been hopeless in love -- where would he be without the gal he rescues or the sassy wisecracker who coaxes him out from his wilderness-tested shell? There are certainly women in "Brokeback Mountain," and they're explicitly tied to life in the town, where things are gray, cramped and hellish. Ennis and Jack are only really themselves out in the ludicrously gorgeous wilderness, where men are free to just be men. And do other men.

So Ang Lee's a little heavy-handed with the symbolism...I'm still, frankly, unimpressed by him as a director, though I think "Brokeback" manages to be a very good film despite him, largely on the merits of the fine script and the astonishingly good Heath Ledger. But enough about such things -- let's discuss the sex. All thirty seconds of it. Worth the hype? Or a little too coy?

Matt: Can't I have one conversation today that doesn't end in a discussion of anal sex?

The sex isn't too coy, it's too sudden. It's one draped arm, one shocking late-night wakeup and then -- boom! -- wham, bam, thank you ma'am (or sir, I guess). Lee is almost certainly trying to convey the irrepressible nature of their passion for one another, but it would be more interesting to see an awkward courtship ritual between the two, but as you've suggested, subtlety is not Lee's strong suit.

Jack and Ennis' relationship is like most movie couples: it's least interesting when they're contented. Audiences like to see suffering and struggle and, for the most part, sex and affection between Ennis and Jack looks an awful lot like a struggle. If the pair kiss at all they are more than likely doing so while simultaneously clawing at each other's throats or swatting away each other's hands. Much is also made of their playful wrestling and their real arguments, fake fighting and real fighting. Because their love is a struggle, you see!

Still, "Brokeback" is a powerful film, largely during the portion where Ennis and Jack, married and miserable, pine away for the relationship they really want but cannot reclaim. You've pointed out Ledger's fine performance as Ennis, but I think Jake Gyllenhaal is being unfairly maligned in what is arguably the tougher role. Heath gets to play the smolder and longing, calling upon decades of iconographic cowboy cool, while Jake has the unglamorous task of playing the desperate guy who doesn't know when to quit (or, as he attests later, doesn't know how to quit).

But Gyllenhaal also ages far more convincingly than Ledger does, and he shines in the couple's climactic confrontation where, with a rather symbolic mountain in the background (the mountain is breaking their backs, you see!) he finally calls Ennis on his poor life choices. As the two part, Lee cuts to the pair back on Brokeback decades earlier, where Jack was fresh-faced and full of life. Lee cuts back to the pair in the present, to a close-up on Gyllenhaal's face, now darker and sadder and full of the weight of a lifetime of regret. The actor shows an entire lifetime in two shots and one cut without the benefit of dialogue.

But we haven't at all addressed the women of "Brokeback." Do they deserve some recognition too?

Alison: That flashback broke my cold critic's heart, by the way. And you're right, the film is strongest at its unhappiest, as it marches inexorably along its path of regret and wasted years. I didn't think the violence that passed as passion between Jack and Ennis was all that bad (though Lee did fumble their initial night together -- Proulx's understated prose was running through my head the whole time) -- in fact, it made sense in terms of Ennis' character in particular, always torn between embracing Jack and shoving him away. I did like that the sex came fairly easily and quickly, while the emotional honesty took two decades.

As for the women...Michelle Williams is very good as Ennis' round-faced baby mama; I was less taken in by Anne Hathaway's brittle Texan society gal -- she just seems too Upper East Side to pull off big hair. But both are given fairly thankless roles of continually channeling disappointment and disapproval, and of being figures representing unwanted responsibility, thankless jobs and depressing surroundings.

In the end, the long-awaited "gay cowboy movie" turns out to not be all that gay -- just some scattered, rough clinches and a decent dose of subdued yearning. At least as much of the film's romantic pining is for the idea of the West, that grand, gorgeous West where you live off the land, a life removed from deprivation, from commitments, and from societal retribution. And a life that, of course, only exists in the movies.

The Final Frontier
That gay-cowboy movie you've heard so little about is even more startling than expected.

By Ken Tucker, New York Magazine

For all its advance publicity -- Newsweek declared it "a must-see for film lovers" and Time averred that it "has generated lip-smacking advance criticism" (that's intended as praise, by the way; who was asleep at the copydesk when that phrase dribbled in?) -- I think large portions of the first wave of audiences for Brokeback Mountain are going to be startled, some rattled, some elated, by the sexual and romantic relationship between the two cowboys played by Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger. When, a half-hour into the film, Gyllenhaal's Jack Twist and Ledger's Ennis Del Mar, both drunk, cold, and lonely on a remote Wyoming campsite, fold around each other and commence an act of sex that manages to be both rough and tender, romantically intimate and lustily intense, Brokeback Mountain achieves its own early climax: You either buy into this tale of men in love or you join the ranks of those who've been snickering during the movie's prerelease trailers, and who can be divided into the insecure, the idiots, or the insecure idiots.

The remarkable thing director Ang Lee has done is to have made a film that remains firmly in the Western genre while never retreating from its portrayal of a tragic love story. We've long had the so-called revisionist Western, usually meant as a cowboy story that contains modern themes or metaphors and dramatizations of social change. In Hud (1963), Paul Newman and director Martin Ritt took Larry McMurtry's novel Horseman, Pass By and used it to turn the contemporary cowboy into a heel, a cad who could seduce you and still give you the creeps. In The Wild Bunch (1969), Sam Peckinpah explored the effects of violence in a manner that couldn't help but remind viewers of the then-contemporary bloody morass in Vietnam.

Similarly, director Lee, working from a story by Annie Proulx and a script by McMurtry and Diana Ossana, pushes the Western to accommodate explicit sexuality. Lee crafts a meditation on that most potent of dramatic subjects -- thwarted love -- without jettisoning the trappings that make the genre satisfying in the first place. It's wonderful to watch Jack and Ennis lope along on horseback, hired hands herding sheep in the gorgeous blue-green Wyoming mountains. When we first meet them, the pair are young bucks who yank at the brims of their carefully dented cowboy hats and poke their booted heels into the ground, staring at their toes while mumbling greetings or small questions: It's as though they're playing out the ritual of shy-guy courtship after having seen too many Gary Cooper movies.

After showing their initial idyll in the mountains, Brokeback Mountain does to its heroes what no movie cowboy wants to have happen: Things change in the world around them. They complete the sheepherding and rejoin society. Ennis mumbles, "This is a one-shot thing we got goin' on here." Jack mumbles back, "Ain't nobody's business but ours." They separate and years go by; they marry -- Jack to a luminous brat (the glowingly smart Anne Hathaway), Ennis to an earnest gal who adores him (the amazingly subtle Michelle Williams) -- but these are fundamentally loveless unions: quiet, piercing betrayals. Jack and Ennis get together every so often, for private "fishing trips" that forge their love and doom it at the same time. The sneaking around and the frustration caused by everything and everyone around them eats away at them when they're apart.

The movie tells us that when pure, strong love gets tamped down and extinguished like a cigarette butt crushed under a boot heel, the result is as immoral and deadly as getting shot in the back. Jack and Ennis are doubly cursed. They can't be together, and they can't abide by the code of honor to which men in Westerns aspire, because that code doesn't allow for these particular emotions. If I'm making it sound as though Brokeback Mountain is a downer, it's actually a serious piece of art in which great joy can be taken in witnessing the small-miracle performances of Ledger (so eloquent in his mute despair) and Gyllenhaal (so meticulously agonized by his daily compromises). Ang Lee conveys maddening delirium rendered in the way one man's eyes gaze at another's, and then look away, and the looking-away amounts to the murder of two souls as surely as if they'd drawn guns and hit each other in the heart.

The New Yorker

The new Ang Lee film, “Brokeback Mountain,” is a love story that starts in 1963 and never ends. The first scene is a master class in the dusty and the taciturn, with gusts of wind doing all the talking. A cowboy stands against a wall in Signal, Wyoming, his hat tipped down as if he were falling asleep. Another fellow, barely more than a kid, turns up in a coughing old truck and joins the waiting game; both are in search of a job. There is something wired and wary in their silence, and the entire passage can be read not only as an echo of Once Upon a Time in the West, whose opening hummed with a similar suspense, but also as an unimaginable change of tune. Sergio Leone’s men were waiting for a train; these boys are falling in love.

At last, we learn their names: Ennis del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal). Both are hired for the summer, to tend the flocks on Brokeback Mountain, and that is where we follow them for the first, idyllic act of their story. This is the most gorgeous part of the movie, and the least successful, partly because an idyll is less an event than a state of being. Lee wants to suggest the savoring of time, yet the camera tends to alight on ravishing formations of rock and cloud, grab them, and then move on, as if we were shuffling through a pile of photographs. (Does any director still have the patience to let our gaze rest without skittering upon the Western landscape?) On the other hand, you could argue that such transience sets the tone -- at once wondrous and fleeting -- for the rest of the movie, and that, if Ennis and Jack have fashioned a rough and rainy Eden for themselves, it is a paradise waiting to be lost.

One evening, a drunken Ennis shares Jack’s tent, and, in the heat of a cold night, there is a breathy, wordless unbuckling of belts. Rumor had it that Brokeback Mountain was an explicit piece of work, and I was surprised by its tameness, although Lee’s helplessly good taste, which has proved to be both a gift and a curb, was always going to lure him away from sweating limbs and toward the coupling of souls. Not once do our heroes mention the word love, nor does any shame or harshness attach to their desire. Indeed, what will vex some viewers is not the act of sodomy but the suggestion that Ennis and Jack are possessed of an innocence, a virginity of spirit, that the rest of society (which literally exists on a lower plane, below the mountain) will strive to violate and subdue. If the lovers hug their secret to themselves, that is because they fear for its survival:

“This is a one-shot thing we got going on here.”
“Nobody’s business but ours.”
“You know I ain’t queer.”
“Me neither.”

American Rousseauism, with its worship of open plains and its dread of civic constraint, is nothing new. The erotic strain of it that unfurls in Brokeback Mountain may seem unprecedented, although, considering that womanless men, bedecked in denim, rivets, and distressed leather, have been pitching camp in the wilderness since movies began, it doesn’t take much of a nudge for the subtext to rise to the surface. There is little in Lee’s film that would have rattled the spurs of Montgomery Clift in Red River.

Brokeback Mountain, which began as an Annie Proulx story in these pages, comes fully alive as the chance for happiness dies. Its beauty wells from its sorrow, because the love between Ennis and Jack is most credible not in the making but in the thwarting. Duty calls; they go their separate ways, get married -- one in Texas, one in Wyoming -- and raise children. Ennis weds Alma (Michelle Williams), while Jack’s wife is a rodeo rider named Lureen (Anne Hathaway), whose knowing wink, from the saddle, is the most brazen come-on in the film. After four years, the two men -- as they now are -- hook up again, and from then on they meet when they can. The most crushing moment comes as Alma glances from the doorway and catches her husband kissing his friend, in a rage of need that she has never seen before. In their frustration, the men are spreading ripples of pain to others, and the others are women and children. The female of the species (think of Lee’s previous heroines, like Joan Allen in The Ice Storm or Jennifer Connelly in The Hulk) suffers no less than the male, but she struggles to escape the suffering, whereas the male swelters inside his strange cocoon. That’s why, when Jack and Ennis part at the end of the first summer, Ennis slips into an alleyway, retches, and punches a wall -- as if the only option, for the unrequited, were to waylay one’s own heart and beat it senseless.

In the end, this is Heath Ledger’s picture. There is no mistaking Jake Gyllenhaal’s finesse (look for the wonderful scene in which he can’t look -- his jaw tightening as Ennis, still just a friend, strips to wash, just past the corner of his eye), but it is Ledger who bears the yoke of the movie’s sadness. His voice is a mumble and a rumble, not because he is dumb but because he hopes that by swallowing his words, he can swallow his feelings, too. In his mixing of the rugged and the maladroit, he makes you realize that Brokeback Mountain is no more a cowboy film than The Last Picture Show. (Both screenplays were written by Larry McMurtry, the earlier in collaboration with Peter Bogdanovich, this one with Diana Ossana.) Each is an elegy for tamped-down lives, with an eye for vanishing brightness of which Jean Renoir would have approved, and you should get ready to crumple at Brokeback Mountain’s final shot: Ennis alone in a trailer, looking at a postcard of Brokeback Mountain and fingering the relics of his time there, with a field of green corn visible, yet somehow unreachable, through the window. This slow and stoic movie, hailed as a gay Western, feels neither gay nor especially Western: it is a study of love under siege. As Ennis says, “If you can’t fix it, Jack, you gotta stand it.”

I think the movie about two gay lover who falls for each other or something... i maybe mistaken though

My friend Tom posted this on his blog --

THE GAY BOOK OF RULES

I've been fascinated by all of the countless thousands of conversations going on about BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN. It's astonishing really how much it's being talked about. Whether you liked the film or not, I don't remember the last time a film got this many people talking.

For obvious reasons I follow a number of gay bloggers, most of whom have posted at length about BROKEBACK. You wanna know where the most backlash is coming from? Yep, you guessed it. The gay community. Talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth -- there are some seriously bitter queens out there who'd kick if they had both their legs cut off.

What occurs to me in reading so many of the comments made by gay guys from all over the country, is that some in the gay community have been writing a Gay Book of Rules and woe be unto those who don't get it right.

I find this sad in a way, but at the same time not so surprising. There is little mainstream entertainment that represents us as something more than nelly buffoons. Think Jack from WILL & GRACE, or any of the other highly caricaturized gays you've seen in the past few years in film or on TV. Stereotypes exist for a reason -- there's some foundation in truth with most of them. But the gay community has evolved and we are as diverse in our own way as the straight community is in theirs. A forty-something attorney and his college professor husband in Massachussetts who are raising children together will no doubt have a hard time finding themselves in most of the gay men portrayed on TV and in film.

Ditto for just about every other "type" of gay guy you can shake a stick at. As we have developed greater freedom to go and do and be, we've become more diversified. For example, you'd be hard-pressed today to find a gay hairdresser in Laguna Beach. When the recently retired mayor spoke at his farewell he ticked off a "You know you're in Laguna when..." list and one of the funniest bits was: "You know you're in Laguna when your hairdresser is straight and your plumber is a woman."

Yes, there are still gay hairdressers but the old stereotype is fading and being replaced with a new one.

As a gay community we have become so diverse that respresenting us all accurately in the entertainment world is getting impossible. Old, tired stereotypes just don't cut it anymore. And in a roundabout way that's what a lot of gay guys are reacting to with BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN. Some are angry that one of the guys dies in the end. Others are incensed that gay guys have once again been portrayed as sex hounds and cheaters. Others still are upset at, of all things, this story for not having the guys run off to the big city and open an interior design business. OK, maybe not an interior design business, but you get my point. What many can't quite understand is why Ennis wouldn't just up and move somewhere, anywhere, so that he could be with Jack.

A lot of guys are looking at this film and saying, "That's not us." When in fact they might be more accurate saying, "That's not me." We've become so hungry for accurate and/or compassionate representation that anything that doesn't match up with our vision of ourselves is often met with scorn and derision. (By some of course, not all.) I'd be willing to bet that the majority of gay guys out there, and a few lesbians as well, are really thrilled that this story got told and got told so well. But there are a surprising number of dissenters from that opinion within the gay community.

They're not talking about the craftmanship involved in the movie, they're talking about the content of the story itself. And it's apparently such a hot button that many seem to have forgotten that we're talking about a fictional story that began in 1963 and continued on up to the early eighties. I have no idea the age of those posting the comments I've been reading -- but Annie Proulx's story is painfully accurate in its depiction of the attitudes and social climate for the period she's writing about. It might be hard for a gay guy in his twenties or early thirties to even remotely begin to comprehend how much has changed just in the past 15 or 20 years. But things have changed. A lot. Expecting BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, which is definitely a period piece, to reflect current social attitudes is obviously an unreasonable expectation.

But there you have it -- a Gay Book of Rules that states that gay men are NOT allowed to die at the end of the film and...

...they have to escape their hellish lives in the outback for a maaahvelous life as HIV-negative gym bunnies who celebrate their uniqueness on a float at the Mardi Gras parade through downtown Sydney.

You can't give us a Will because he never gets a boyfriend. Jack is too nelly, hairdressers too passe`, cowboys too much of an imitation of John Wayne, buttfucking too vulgar, lesbians too fat, AIDS too eighties, QUEER AS FOLK too promiscuous, Madonna too cliched, (OK, we might be onto something there) Elton too gay, Eminem too homophobic, BROKEBACK too gay, BROKEBACK not gay enough, BROKEBACK made by too many heterosexuals.

"Where are the gay actors?" they cry. "WHERE ARE THE GAY ACTORS?" [hint] look in the closet...

And on and on and on it goes. Seems no matter what is handed us there are those in the gay community who are so lost in their discontent that not even something as poignant and beautiful as BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN can sate them.

I don't know, what would it take?

Was there a cry that went up from the straight community when Leonardo diCaprio's Jack died at the end of Titanic? Don't gay people die tragically too?

Was anybody upset that Charlize Theron played a lesbian serial-killer when she wasn't one in real life???

And excuse me just for a moment here, but I don't give a rat's ass that Gyllenhall and Ledger are straight. I'd take either of them or both at the same time, right here right now, no questions asked. (Whew, glad I got that off my chest.)

At some point I think we're going to have to make peace with the fact that no single movie or story is ever going to be able to gather us all up in its warm embrace and make all of us feel comfortable, safe and at home all in the same place, all at the same time.

I love BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN. It's an insightful story and a beautiful, haunting film that really does get to the heart of the matter without trying to be right for anybody but the characters Annie Proulx created. Ennis and Jack and their wives aren't me and they aren't you. They're who Annie Proulx created them to be. What she did was tell THEIR story, not mine and not yours. Where this expectation has come from that a fictional story somehow has to toe the line for each and every one of us as individuals, is a mystery to me.

As lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and the transgendered, known collectively as the LGBT community, we're doing way too many different things and living far too different lives from each other to expect that any one film or television show is going to accurately reflect who all of us have become. Not only is it unrealistic to expect such a thing but it also suggests a desire to homogenize away this astonishingly beautiful range of individuality we express by compacting us down into one universally accurate and politically-correct nugget of gayness.

BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN is a very tightly focused story about two men who fall in love and it follows their lives over a period of about twenty years. The story begins in 1963 and takes place in Wyoming. It's a fictional story, born out of the creativity and imagination of historian and writer Annie Proulx. It was not intended to be a political statement nor was it intended to be a universal representation of all gay men. BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN is about Ennis and Jack, two ranch hands who come of age and fall in love with each other in the early sixties. That's what Annie Proulx wrote about but apparently she did it without the assistance of the Gay Book of Rules that states that all gay love stories today have to be told in such a way that they reflect all of us with unerring accuracy.

As if all of us gay men were all the same.