Brokeback Mountain
Directed by Ang Lee
Starring Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Anne Hathaway, Michelle Williams
Screening nationally
REVIEW BY JOHN BRANSGROVE
In his 1984 book The Celluloid Closet, Vito Russo presented a critique of the way Hollywood has depicted queers, from silent films to the present. Russo hypothesised that queer characters fit into three unflattering stereotypes: the sissy, the sinister deviant and the tragic martyr. If Russo survived to see Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain, he may have revised his theory.
Brokeback Mountain tells the story of a ranch hand and a rodeo cowboy who meet while herding sheep in Wyoming, the state that witnessed the brutal murder of Matthew Shepherd in 1998. Ennis Del Marr (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) are hired by Joe Aguirre (Randy Quaid) for the summer to tend his flock. Both are about 19. Alone in their natural environs, they forge a passionate bond. Their affair spans two decades, from their initial pairing on Brokeback in the summer of 1963 to the early 1980s.
Jack's physical attraction to Ennis is clear early on. Ennis is inarticulate and closed-mouthed. But sorry, fellow gayboys, if you are hanging out to see this flick to catch the hot pairing of Gyllenhaal and Ledger, you may be disappointed. Nor is it a study of the ins and outs of gay sex. Their first sexual encounter is violent, suggesting repressed desire, even if it is not particularly realistic. They spend the rest of the summer like randy teenagers, all the while carrying on doing the things that cowboys do.
Neither is prepared to question his sexuality. "I ain't no queer", protests Ennis. "Me neither", Jack fires back. Their blissful outdoor romance is cut short by a looming blizzard and both return to their predetermined course in life. Ennis marries his high-school sweetheart, Alma, and produces two daughters. Jack returns to rodeo in Texas and earns a reputation as a monosyllabic loner at bars, attempting to entice the local boys into conversation. There he catches the eye of Lureen, whom he marries and they have a son.
Four years pass, then Jack sends Ennis a postcard saying that he will visit. At their initial reunion, the fact that their bond has grown stronger with the passage of time is clear. Over the ensuing years, the two lovers sporadically tell their wives that they are going on "fishing trips", in order to escape to Brokeback Mountain to be together.
The earnest Jack and the outwardly stoic Ennis seem an odd pairing. Jack is more gregarious than Ennis. For the less masculine, he is also the braver of the two. He makes it clear that he wants to be with Ennis and is prepared to bear society's prescribed cost of his own happiness. Ennis is unmovably stubborn, "I told you it ain't gonna be that way".
Jack is slightly more able to accept that he is gay. By contrast, each time Ennis is confronted by his sexuality, the reaction is raw and violent. He recounts a childhood story of how his father and a gang of thugs tortured and murdered two men, "tough old birds", after which his father subjected his boys to the mutilated corpses to make clear what happens to queers. Consequently, the inner turmoil between his true human identity and the reality of his social condition elicits a self-destructive spiral.
Michelle Williams' portrayal of Alma is a study in nerves; we watch her composure progressively crumble as she spends years trying to keep her family together, even though she has long known the truth about her husband. She is also a victim of queer oppression, forced into a loveless marriage with a man whom she cannot satisfy emotionally or physically. This depiction of human misery as the cost of society's rigid structure is succinctly portrayed by Lee, who uses natural outdoor settings as the physical context of the love story, as opposed to dark interiors as the backdrop to the unhappy circumstances in which they persevere.
We queers all have our own Brokeback story — one true love that, for one reason or another, we were denied. One of the final shots, featuring Ennis crouching inside a bedroom closet as he inhales Jack's scent on an old shirt, is an obvious metaphor for the closets that we all inhabit from time to time. He is a tragic figure, not in the usual patronising way that Hollywood often portrays queers, but because the only love he has ever known is not enough to overcome his own internalised homophobia, something instilled in him by the society in which we all inhabit.
Much like Marlon Brando did in On the Waterfront, Ledger takes an unshowy role as an inarticulate, inhibited character and harnesses it into the emotional and moral core of this amazing story. Unlike Brando, Ledger is not on the noble side of a moral divide that permeates the narrative; rather the moral dilemma is within himself. The film's final scene, an emotional account of love between Ennis and his 19-year-old daughter, reveals an implicit plea by the father for his daughter not to repeat his own mistakes. The result is as good as anything Brando ever did.
Brokeback Mountain is one of the best things to have ever emerged from the dollar-driven apparatus of Hollywood capitalism. The political reaction has been predictable. Most absurdly, Lee has been attacked for his perversion of the "morality" of the American western, as if the film is an unprovoked assault on the chauvinism, misogyny and racism of the John Wayne classics. Even Kevin Costner's politically correct Dances With Wolves had its "good Indians" and its "bad Indians". Regardless, Brokeback is hardly the first western to feature repressed homosexuality. Just go back and see Howard Hawks' Red River again and John Ireland's stab at Montgomery Clift — "Say, that's a good looking gun you've got there" and you'll know what I mean. Its only offence may be the way it honestly portrays queer people in their own reality, rather than something to laugh at, something to pity or something to fear.
In the self-indulgent avalanche of honours that occurs each year as Hollywood and its disciples pat themselves on the back, the prestigious New York Film Critics Circle has already named Brokeback as the year's best picture. It remains to be seen whether the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has the nerve to embrace the film. Oscar has routinely shied away from controversial choices in the face of a backlash from the US right ever since 1941, when the Hearst newspaper empire destroyed the budding career of Orson Welles and nearly succeeded in destroying his Citizen Kane for posterity.
Getting support from the hallowed institutions of our hetero-normative society might not be the objective of the queer struggle, but it may not do any harm as we seek to change hearts and minds in the absence of revolutionary upheaval. Ang Lee, deftly wielding the considerable professional capital he has accumulated over the years with more conventional art-house fare as Sense and Sensibility and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, has achieved something that is difficult to comprehend.
Whether the film compromises its political message is for others to judge. There is not a great deal of sex, but then this is not a porno. Instead, Lee has succeeded in finessing the universal theme of love with the intimate story of queer love doomed to perish in an oppressive straight world, in a way that makes it readily accessible to a mass audience. As a political rather than an artistic achievement, it might be the best we can hope for.
From Green Left Weekly, February 1, 2006.
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