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Brokeback Mountain
 In a piece in The New York Times last week, Curb Your Enthusiasm's Larry David confessed he would be boycotting Brokeback Mountain for fear it might stir uncomfortable homosexual leanings in him: 'If two cowboys, male icons who are 100 percent all-man, can succumb, what chance to do I have, half- to a quarter of a man, depending on whom I'm with at the time?' He was kidding, naturally. But that didn't stop some readers from taking him seriously - some even wrote in to voice their support. But so far, a couple of weeks in to its limited US release, Ang Lee's film has been a tremendous success, raking in a higher screen average than Spielberg's Munich and adding numerous critics' film of the year accolades to the Golden Lion it picked up at the Venice Film Festival. Perhaps liberal America has decided to wake up and show the tolerance and compassion which have been so sorely lacking in the recent past. Or perhaps they just sense a good tearjerker when it's offered to them.
One night, lubricated with alcohol and sheltering from a storm they roll together - a compulsive, hungry act which is a far cry from the chaste asexuality of Philadelphia. The next morning there is sheepish denial and shame. 'I ain't queer,' says one. 'Me neither', says the other. But what's done cannot be undone; the genie cannot be put back in the bottle. The summer idyll ends and Jack and Ennis go their separate ways. They both marry and have kids. But they know they're living lies. And when they meet again several years later, it's as if they've never been apart.
Heath Ledger is a revelation as Ennis: coiled into such a tight ball of anger and denial he seems in danger of beating himself up. Gyllenhaal is better in the younger scenes. A stretch as a cowboy, he's not entirely convincing in middle-age. But he does lend an easy charm to Jack that the movie really needs. Similarly Anne Hathaway is slightly caricatured as his cow-gal wife, while Michelle Williams (Ledger's real-life partner) is genuinely affecting as her opposite number.
Tom Charity 
More information about Brokeback Mountain » Critics' Reviews
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It's a nuanced and complex study of desire, loneliness and the ambiguities swirling beneath the accepted codes of rural life. And, as such, one of the finest movies of the year. Entertainment Weekly BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN is that rare thing, a big Hollywood weeper with a beautiful ache at its center. It's a modern-age Western that turns into a quietly revolutionary love story. New York Times The lonesome chill that seeps through Ang Lee's epic western, BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN is as bone deep as the movie's heartbreaking story... Members' ReviewsReviews Voted Most HelpfulMost Recent Reviews |
Is Brokeback Mountain a gay western? Well, I think it's more accurately described as a love story, but yes, these lovers are cowboys. Jake Gyllenhaal is Jack Twist; Heath Ledger is Ennis del Mar. They meet in 1963 when they're both hired to herd sheep for the summer up on the eponymous Wyoming crags. One sets camp down in the valley, while the other has to sleep up with the herd to ward off predators. At breakfast and supper they share whiskey and beans and occasionally even a word or two - though Ennis is as taciturn as cowboys are generally made out to be.
Scripted by Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove; The Last Picture Show) but based on a short story (just 30-odd pages long) by E Annie Proulx - perhaps it takes a woman to write a gay cowboy? - Brokeback Mountain is a long, slow movie. In fact at 134 minutes, it's needlessly repetitive and too long. But it's not too slow. The pacing is crucial. It allows us time to acclimatise, to savour the wide open spaces which will come to mean so much to these men, destined as they are to spend their lives in the closet. And it gives us time understand these two characters who are not particularly brave, admirable, or honest, but whose better qualities are crushed by repressive forces they only dimly comprehend within themselves and the world at large. By the end, we find we have invested a good deal in their experience.
Some critics have complained that by setting the movie in Marlboro country - stunningly photographed by Rodrigo Prieto - the filmmakers have conveniently ducked the last 30 years of gay lib. It's true. Next week's Neil Jordan film Breakfast on Pluto is an infinitely less macho gay story. But frankly, there is no shortage of gay movies made by, for and about cosmopolitan gays in New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco. Given that the terrifying prospect of gay marriage probably won George Bush re-election last year, Brokeback Mountain does us all a service by addressing itself to middle-America's red states, what they used to call 'the heartland'.