director
Ang Lee
screenwriters
Larry McMurtry
Diana Ossana
based on
the story by
E. Annie
Proulx
producers
Diana Ossana
James Schamus
cinematographer
Rodrigo Prieto
music
Gustavo Santaolalla
editor
Geraldine Peroni
Dylan Tichenor
cast
Heath Ledger (Ennis Del Mar)
Jake Gyllenhaal (Jack Twist)
Randy Quaid (Joe Aguirre)
Anne Hathaway (Lureen Newsome)
Michelle Williams (Alma Del Mar)
Valerie Planche (Waitress)
Kate Mara (Alma Jr. - Age 19)
Anna Faris (LaShawn Malone)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 134m
u.s.
release: 12/9/05
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
other ang
lee films
reviewed on this website:
- crouching tiger, hidden dragon
- hulk
- the ice storm
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The eponymous range in Brokeback
Mountain is many things, but it sure doesn't look like a
place that could nurture love. The clouds in the Wyoming sky
look like bruises on metal; if the cold or the hail don't get
you, the bears or coyotes might. Aptly named, it's a real spine-cruncher
of a locale, especially if you're a cowboy riding a skittish
horse and trying to move hundreds of sheep from one end of the
rocky, barren place to the other. Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain,
adapted from Annie Proulx' 1997 story first published in The
New Yorker, imagines the nosebleed parts of Wyoming
as the world itself, a vast yet constricting place where forms
of love that don't meet with society's approval are shunted off
among the creeks and wildlife. The mountain is both an epic backdrop
and a closet.
It's 1963, and two hard-luck
ranch hands -- Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake
Gyllenhaal) -- meet at the trailer of their would-be employer,
Joe Aguirre (Randy Quaid). They're assigned to Brokeback, where
they'll theoretically keep Joe's sheep from becoming coyote munchies.
It's a harsh and lonely job - the men are supposed to camp miles
apart - and Ennis and Jack fill their time together with resentful
talk about the boss and a few tidbits of autobiography. Jack
does rodeos for off-season cash; orphaned young, with no family
to fall back on, Ennis mostly kicks around. After about half
an hour of screen time (seven pages in Proulx' concise story),
it happens: the men share a tent and find themselves in the grip
of a passion neither one understands.
Brokeback Mountain is not, as some claim, part of "the
gay agenda"; it has the simplicity and clarity of a fable,
wedded to the gnarled and taciturn physical realism of the Western.
It is the classical star-crossed love, intended by Lee and screenwriters
Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana to be universal. Two men form
the core, but Ennis emerges as the (flawed) hero, a man so strangled
by fear that even his words come out half-swallowed. Ennis knows
from horrid experience what happens to men like him and Jack
in this part of the land. He says goodbye to Jack at the end
of the season, then throws himself into marriage (Michelle Williams,
as his wife Alma, emerges here as a major young actress post-Dawson's Creek) and kids. It's what
he's supposed to do. Jack, for his part, meets and marries a
feisty cowgirl (Anne Hathaway) and becomes an afterthought in
his own life, treated contemptuously by his rich in-laws.
Every so often, the men reunite
(for "fishing trips" that fail to fool their wives
for long) and head for Brokeback Mountain, the one place they
can be themselves. Jack is impatient; he wants to start up a
ranch with Ennis and be with him all the time. Ennis, averting
his eyes, mumbles about work commitments he can't get out of.
There isn't much overt, external homophobia in Brokeback Mountain
-- even mean old Joe Aguirre doesn't blow the whistle on the
men when he spots them wrestling half-naked, and we feel that
if Ennis and Jack had done a better job with the sheep, he would've
hired them back no matter what they did at night. The phobia
is all internal -- Jack beating his head against Ennis' nightmare
of what might happen. Heath Ledger has gotten more interesting
in the past couple of years, but this is his finest and most
subtly shaded work yet; he makes Ennis a man mentally lashing
out at shadows but too afraid even to speak most of the
time. He shows us the terror inside the laconic Western hero.
Brokeback Mountain is the ideal project for Ang Lee,
a director who has probed the sore spots of repressed people
throughout his career: the gay-themed The Wedding Banquet
(1993), Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), Sense and Sensibility
(1995), The Ice Storm (1997),
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
(2000), even Hulk (2003). Lee
tells this story with delicate candor, making stunning use of
the imposing (and actually Canadian) backdrop and working with
a sensual rigor almost unmatched in recent films: You can just
about taste the terrible coffee, smell the sheep, feel the skin-flaying
cold. As pure cinema, the movie is a considerable triumph, told
with as few words as possible; "You don't say much, but
you get your point across," someone says to Ennis' daughter
(a chip off the old tight-lipped block), and that extends to
Brokeback Mountain, which should not be used by
one political side or another as a cultural bludgeon. It's more
like one of those bruise-colored clouds in the Wyoming sky --
viewed by some as a harbinger of destruction, welcomed by others
as a cleansing and undeniable force that allows for blooming.
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