Brokeback Mountain

Ennis tells Jack about something he saw as a boy. “There were two old guys shacked up together. They were the joke of the town, even though they were pretty tough old birds.” One day they were found beaten to death. Ennis says, “My dad, he made sure me and my brother saw it. For all I know, he did it.”

This childhood memory is always there, in the traumatized area, in Ang Lee’s 2005 “Brokeback Mountain.” When he was taught by his father to hate homosexuals, Ennis was taught to hate his own self. Years after he first makes love with Jack on a Wyoming mountain, after his marriage has failed, after his world has crushed to a mobile home, the laundromat, the TV, he still feels the same pain: “Why don’t you let me be? It’s because of you, Jack, that I’m like this – nothing and nobody.”

But it’s not because of Jack. It’s because Ennis and Jack love each other and can find no way to deal with that. “Brokeback Mountain” has been described as “a gay cowboy movie,” which is a cruel explanation. It is the story of a time and place where two men are forced to deny the only large love either one will ever feel. Roger Ebert said in his review, “Their tragedy is universal. It could be about two women, or lovers from different religious or ethnic groups -- any "forbidden" love.”

The movie smartly never goes away from looking at the larger picture, or deliver the “message.” It is specifically the story of these men, this love. It stays upfront. That’s how Jack and Ennis see it. “You know I ain’t queer,” Ennis tells Jack after their first night together. “Me, neither,” says Jack.

Their story begins in Wyoming in 1963, when Ennis (the late Heath Ledger) and Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal) are about 19-years-old and get a job tending sheep on a mountain. Ennis is a laconic boy that he can barely even say what he wants. Ebert described, “He learned to be guarded and fearful long before he knew what he feared. Jack, who has done some rodeo riding, is a little more outgoing.” After some days have gone by on the mountain and drinking whiskey, they suddenly and almost aggressively make love.

“This is a one-shot thing we got going on here,” Ennis says the next day. Jack agrees, but it’s not. When the summer is over, they part dryly: “I guess I’ll see ya around, huh?” Their boss, played by Randy Quaid, tells Jack he doesn’t want him back next summer: “You guys sure found a way to make the time pass up there. You weren’t getting paid to let the dogs guard the sheep while you stemmed the rose.”

After a few years have passed, both men get married. Ebert said, “Then Jack goes to visit Ennis in Wyoming, and the undiminished urgency of their passion stuns them. Their lives settle down into a routine, punctuated less often than Jack would like by "fishing trips."” Ennis’ wife, who has seen them kissing, says nothing about it for a long time. But she notices there are never any fish.

The movie is based on a short story by E. Annie Proulx. The screenplay is by Larry McMurty and Diana Ossana. Ebert admitted, “This summer I read McMurtry's Lonesome Dove trilogy, and as I saw the movie I was reminded of Gus and Woodrow, the two cowboys who spend a lifetime together.” They aren’t gay. One of them is a womanizer and other spends his whole life regretting the loss of the one woman he loved. Ebert said, “They're straight, but just as crippled by a society that tells them how a man must behave and what he must feel.”

“Brokeback Mountain” could tell the story and not really be a great movie. It could be a melodrama. It could be a “gay cowboy movie,” but the filmmakers have focused so closely and with such feeling on Jack and Ennis that the movie is as observant as work by Bergman. Ebert said, “Strange but true: The more specific a film is, the more universal, because the more it understands individual characters, the more it applies to everyone. I can imagine someone weeping at this film, identifying with it, because he always wanted to stay in the Marines, or be an artist or a cabinetmaker.”

Jack is able to accept a little more willingly that he is obviously gay. In frustration and desperation, he goes to Mexico one night and finds a male prostitute. Ebert is right when he said, “Prostitution is a calling with many hazards, sadness and tragedy, but it accepts human nature. It knows what some people need, and perhaps that is why every society has found a way to accommodate it.” Jack thinks he and Ennis might someday buy themselves a ranch and settle down. Ennis who remembers what he saw as a boy: “This thing gets hold of us at the wrong time and wrong place and we’re dead.” Ebert then asks, “Well, wasn't Matthew Shepard murdered in Wyoming in 1998? And Teena Brandon in Nebraska in 1993? Haven't brothers killed their sisters in the Muslim world to defend "family honor"?”

There are gentle and shaded visuals of Ennis’ wife Alma (Michelle Williams) and Jack’s wife Lureen (Anne Hathaway), who are important characters, also seen as victims. Williams has a powerful scene where she finally calls Ennis on his “fishing trips,” but she takes a long time to call, because nothing in her background prepares her for what she has found out about her husband. Ebert said, “In their own way, programs like "Jerry Springer" provide a service by focusing on people, however pathetic, who are prepared to defend what they feel. In 1963 there was nothing like that on TV.” In 2005, the situation has not completely changed. One of the Oscar campaign ads for “Brokeback Mountain” shows Ledger and Williams together, although the movie’s posters are completely honest.

Ang Lee is a director whose films are set in many nations and many times. What they have in common is an innate sympathy for the characters. Born in Taiwan, he makes movies about Americans, British, Chinese, straights, gays. His sci-fi movie “Hulk” was about a misunderstood outsider. Here Lee respects the entire arc of his story, right down to the lonely conclusion.

A final scene that is a visit by Ennis to Jack’s parents is crushing in what is said, and not said, about their life. A look around Jack’s childhood bedroom says what he overcame to make room for his feelings. What we cannot be sure is this: In the flashback, are we witnessing what really happened, or how Ennis sees it in his imagination? Ennis, whose father “made sure me and my brother saw it.”

I remember reading the short story for an “Ethics in Literature” class in college and saw a short scene from this movie. I knew about this movie since high school, but when I saw it a few years back, I didn’t know how emotional the movie was. After seeing it once, I don’t think I can ever see this again because of how sad it can get. Still, I seriously think that everyone should see this movie to know what I mean. Just a forewarning: this is a highly emotional movie and if you cry, I won’t be surprised.

Look out next week when I look at an action-packed western in “Western Month.”