New West Film Review

Brokeback Mountain: The Best Contemporary Realistic Western Ever?

By Jenny Shank, 11-22-05

	Courtesy of Focus Features and River Road Entertainment.

At the closing night festivities of the Denver International Film Festival Saturday, Academy Award-winning director Ang Lee received a standing ovation after the U.S. premier of his new film, Brokeback Mountain. “I guess you liked the movie," Lee observed amid audience cheers. The film, which is scheduled for limited release on December 9, is a profoundly moving love story that ponders great Western myths, plumbs its characters’ connection to the Wyoming landscape, and turns on spare dialogue that reveals the poetry of Western reticence. As co-screenwriter Larry McMurtry observed about the movie at an earlier event, “It says what it needs to say and then it shuts up." Ultimately, Brokeback Mountain concerns a good deal more than the inevitable shorthand description of its plot as “a gay cowboy movie."

The film, based on the short story of the same name by Annie Proulx, opens in 1963, with the first meeting of the principal characters, ranch hand Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and rodeo cowboy Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal). Hired by crusty Joe Aquirre (Randy Quaid) to mind sheep in their summer pasture high on Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming, Ledger and Twist gradually develop a friendship that becomes a 20-year, tumultuous homosexual relationship, tested by the demands and suspicions of their families and by the strict social code of the West.

Ledger is transcendent in the role of Ennis, embodying the myth of the hard-bitten cowboy. His face is windblown and his mouth is screwed up into the tight line that comes from a lifetime of choking all of his speech into terse two-word statements. He has internalized the prevailing code of manliness, and is quick to fight when he feels he has been disrespected. At the outset, Ledger is the more reluctant of the pair, having learned firsthand when he was a young boy that the penalty for violating the social code of the West through the expression of homosexuality is death. Gyllenhaal is the romantic, fantasizing about the two of them living together on a ranch one day. Ledger, the pragmatist, restricts their meetings to camping trips on Brokeback Mountain, far away from the disapproving town.

Brokeback Mountain offers something extra for the Western viewer, in its hyper-realistic depictions of a small Wyoming town in the ‘60s, where ranch workers live in a state of near poverty, the only acceptable social outlets are church gatherings and the local bar, the only acceptable drinks are whiskey and beer, and the only acceptable course for a life is to get married young, have children early, and work hard until you die. When Gyllenhaal moves to Texas, the film expertly portrays the differences between Texas and Wyoming customs, hairstyles, accents, and practices, providing a nuanced look at the West that is rare in film.

Part of the beauty of Lee’s film is the contrast between basin and range life in the West. All of Ledger and Gyllenhaal’s trysts take place in the gorgeous Wyoming Rockies (capably portrayed by the Canadian Rockies). The rarefied air, the clear streams, and the snow-capped peaks mirror the happiness of the doomed couple during their brief moments together. It’s basin life—in town—that wears a man down. In town, Ledger and Gyllenhaal are pressed with social, family, and work obligations, and must evade the ever-dangerous gaze of town gossips.

Ang Lee’s film is all the more powerful for the way it doesn’t spell out what lesser movies would. The hint that several female characters know of and accept the men’s secret is expressed only through glances from the actresses’ warm eyes. Brokeback Mountain excels in virtually every way it’s possible for a film to excel. With superb acting, penetrating, spare dialogue, a gorgeous setting, a gripping plot, and heart-wrenching, mythic themes, Brokeback Mountain could soon take its place as a classic American Western.

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