Stephen Holden, 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 of two cowboys who fall in love almost by accident. It is embedded in the craggy landscape where their idyll begins and ends. It creeps into the farthest corners of the wide-open spaces they share with coyotes, bears and herds of sheep and rises like a stifled cry into the big, empty sky that stretches beyond the horizon. One night, when their campfire dies, and the biting cold drives them to huddle together in a bedroll, a sudden spark between Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) flares into an undying flame. The same mood of acute desolation permeates the spare, gnarly prose of Annie Proulx's short story, first published in The New Yorker in 1997, adapted by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. Mr. McMurtry knows about loneliness. Its ache suffused his novel and his screenplay for "The Last Picture Show," made into a film 34 years ago by Peter Bogdanovich. The sexual bouts between these two ranch hands who have never heard the term gay (in 1963, when the story begins, it was still a code word transiting into the mainstream) are described by Ms. Proulx as "quick, rough, laughing and snorting." That's exactly how Mr. Lee films their first sexual grappling (discreetly) in the shadows of the cramped little tent. The next morning, Ennis mumbles, "I'm no queer." And Jack replies, "Me neither." Still, they do it again, and again, in the daylight as well as at night. Sometimes their pent-up passions explode in ferocious roughhouse that is indistinguishable from fighting. This moving and majestic film would be a landmark if only because it is the first Hollywood movie to unmask the homoerotic strain in American culture that Leslie Fiedler discerned in his notorious 1948 Partisan Review essay, "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey." Fiedler characterized the bond between Huckleberry Finn and Jim, a runaway slave, as an unconscious romantic attachment shared by two males of different races as they flee the more constraining and civilizing domain of women. He went on to identify that bond as a recurrent theme in American literature. In popular culture, Fiedler's Freudianism certainly could be applied to the Lone Ranger and Tonto. Minus the ethnic division, it might also be widened to include a long line of westerns and buddy movies, from Red River to Midnight Cowboy to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: the pure male bonding that dare not explore its shadow side. Ennis and Jack's 20-year romance begins when they are hired in the summer of 1963 by Joe Aguirre (Randy Quaid), a hard-boiled rancher, to work as sheepherders on Brokeback Mountain in the Wyoming high country. (The movie was filmed in Alberta, in the Canadian Rockies.) Subsisting mostly on canned beans and whiskey, the two cowboys develop a boozy friendship by the campfire. So taciturn and bottled up that he swallows his syllables as he pulls words out of his mouth in gruff, reluctant grunts, Ennis tells Jack of being raised by a brother and sister after his parents died in a car crash; Jack, brought up in the rodeo, is more talkative and recalls his lifelong alienation from his father, a bull rider. When signs of an early blizzard cut short their summer employment, Ennis and Jack go their separate ways; Ennis's farewell is a simple "See you around." Both, though, are torn up. Ennis marries his girlfriend, Alma (Michelle Williams), and they have two daughters. Jack meets and marries Lureen (Anne Hathaway), a Texan rodeo queen, with whom he has a son, and joins her father's farm-equipment business. Four years pass before Jack, who is living in Texas, sends a general-delivery postcard to Ennis, who has settled in Wyoming, saying he will be in the area and would like to visit. The instant they set eyes on each other, their suspended passion erupts into a spontaneous clinch. Alma sees it all, and her face, from that moment on, remains frozen in misery. The reunited lovers rush to a motel. So begins a sporadic and tormented affair in which the two meet once or twice a year for fishing trips on which no fish are caught. Jack urges that they forsake their marriages and set up a ranch together. But Ennis, haunted by a childhood memory of his father taking him to see the mutilated body of a rancher, tortured and beaten to death with a tire iron for living with another man, is immobilized by fear and shame. Both Mr. Ledger and Mr. Gyllenhaal make this anguished love story physically palpable. Mr. Ledger magically and mysteriously disappears beneath the skin of his lean, sinewy character. It is a great screen performance, as good as the best of Marlon Brando and Sean Penn. The pain and disappointment felt by Jack, who is softer, more self-aware and self-accepting, continually registers in Mr. Gyllenhaal's sad, expectant silver-dollar eyes. The second half of the movie opens up Ms. Proulx's story to follow both men's slowly crumbling marriages. For years, Alma chokes on her pain until one day, after she and Ennis have divorced, it rises up as if she were strangling on her own bile. As Jack, desperately frustrated, has clandestine encounters with other men, Ms. Hathaway's Lureen slowly calcifies into a clenched robotic shell of her peppery younger self. Brokeback Mountain is not quite the period piece that some would like to imagine. America's squeaky closet doors may have swung open far enough for a gay rodeo circuit to flourish. But let's not kid ourselves. In large segments of American society, especially in sports and the military, those doors remain sealed. The murder of Matthew Shepard, after all, took place in Brokeback territory. Another recent film, Jarhead (in which Mr. Gyllenhaal plays a marine), suggests how any kind of male behavior perceived as soft and feminine within certain closed male environments triggers abuse and violence and how that repression of sexual energy is directly channeled into warfare. Yet Brokeback Mountain is ultimately not about sex (there is very little of it in the film) but about love: love stumbled into, love thwarted, love held sorrowfully in the heart. Or, as Ms. Proulx writes, "What Jack remembered and craved in a way he could neither help nor understand was the time that distant summer on Brokeback when Ennis had come up behind him and pulled him close, the silent embrace satisfying some shared and sexless hunger." One tender moment's reprieve from loneliness can illuminate a life.
Kenneth Turan, LA TIMES Brokeback Mountain is a groundbreaking film because it isn't. It's a deeply felt, emotional love story that deals with the uncharted, mysterious ways of the human heart just as so many mainstream films have before it. The two lovers here just happen to be men. Big star vehicles with homosexual protagonists are, of course, not new; one of them, 1993's "Philadelphia," even won a best actor Oscar for star Tom Hanks. But these films invariably have had an air of earnest special pleading about them, a sense that they'd rather do good in the world than tell a good story. Instead of emphasizing its apartness, Brokeback Mountain insists it is a romance like any other, and that makes all the difference. Confidently directed by Ang Lee and featuring sensitive and powerful performances by Jake Gyllenhaal and a breathtaking Heath Ledger, this film is determined to involve us in the naturalness and even inevitability of its epic, complicated love story. What Larry McMurtry (who co-wrote the screenplay with Diana Ossana) said of Pulitzer Prize winner E. Annie Proulx's original short fiction is equally true of the film: "It was a story that had been sitting there for years, waiting to be told." That lack of affect befits the nature of its protagonists, who begin as a pair of 19-year-old cowboys in Wyoming ranch country circa 1963. In Proulx's words, Ennis del Mar (Ledger) and Jack Twist (Gyllenhaal) were "rough-mannered, rough-spoken, inured to the stoic life," men who would mightily resist an avowedly gay lifestyle or even the label homosexual. Even after sex, Ennis could insist "I'm not no queer," with Jack adding, "Me neither. A one-shot thing. Nobody's business but ours." If great love stories are about obstacles (and they often are), this one has them to spare. "Brokeback Mountain" had obstacles of its own to contend with. Screenwriters McMurtry and Ossana optioned the story of this enduring relationship and wrote the script soon after it appeared in the New Yorker in 1997. But the "scary and sensitive" nature of the project (Ang Lee's words) meant that it took eight years to reach the screen. Sometimes, however, good things really do come to those who are forced to wait, and it is difficult to imagine a team better suited to transferring "Brokeback Mountain" to the screen than the one that finally emerged, starting with director Lee. A Taiwanese native, Lee is completely at home in the widest variety of situations, from the mythical China of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" to the 18th century England of Jane Austen's "Sense and Sensibility." There is often something spare and removed in his direction, a willingness to be pulled back and deliberate, and those qualities enhance this film's ability to be direct and uncluttered in telling Ennis and Jack's story. Even for a chameleon such as Lee, "Brokeback Mountain" has an impeccable sense of the rhythms and vistas of the remote West, a feeling for its lonely vastness and godforsaken settlements as well as its expansive beauty. For this credit the gifted Mexican cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (Amores Perros, 21 Grams) and, of course, original voice Proulx and screenwriters McMurtry and Ossana. Taking their cues from the source, which McMurtry has called "one of the finest short stories I've read ... drawn precisely and convincingly," the writing partners have fleshed out the characters and the situations very much in the spirit of Proulx's work. It can at times seem like a bit of a stretch to expand a 31-page story into a two hour and 14 minute movie, but in fact it is the film's patience with its material that creates its effect. For although an affair like this may seem arbitrary if heard about in the abstract or even if viewed in unconnected coming attraction clips, watching it gradually develop on screen, unfolding with a quiet, step-by-step naturalness, makes it emotionally convincing. Taking time, not being in a hurry, lends credibility to a destination everyone but the protagonists know is coming. Ennis and Jack meet each other in front of a trailer office in Signal, Wyo., where they're hired by rancher Joe Aguirre (a properly dyspeptic Randy Quaid) to spend the summer watching over a large herd of sheep on Brokeback Mountain. Though both men are laconic and wedded to the cowboy life (Ennis wants to be a rancher, Jack a rodeo bull-rider), there are differences between them. Jack is the showier character, the livelier wire, while Ennis is somber and grounded, the boy orphaned young who never came to trust the world. Alone in nature's grandness, they are drawn to each other almost without their knowing it's happening. When the intimacy between them takes hold, it is graphic, candid, unapologetic. As Proulx writes of a later kiss, passion seizes them "easily as the right key turns the lock tumblers." Yet, as the film is at pains to insist, it is a lonely passion that has no place in their world. Theirs is a bond unlike anything either man has known before: not because it's a same-sex relationship but because of the strength of the feelings involved. Their closeness perplexes, confounds and confuses Ennis and Jack; it's something they can neither explain nor control. The summer ends and both men go off to the rest of their lives. Ennis marries his sweetheart Alma (Michelle Williams), and Jack, moving to Texas, falls into a marriage with Lureen (Anne Hathaway), a rodeo rider with a well-to-do father. They think that what happened on Brokeback Mountain is over, but it is not. For what Ennis and Jack reluctantly come to realize is that, all unawares, they have stumbled into the great love of their lives, with all the problems and complications that implies for themselves and the others in their life. In a profound sense, because of the pressures of the time and place they live in, they are lost whether together or apart, riven by the agonizing longing they feel, by the chances not taken and the choices just out of reach. Brokeback Mountain would not be the success it is without excellent acting across the board. Though he is hampered by an unconvincing aging job, Gyllenhaal brings a fine harum-scarum energy and feeling to Jack's character, and Williams, glummer than she ever was in "The Station Agent," illuminates all the corners of Alma's sadness. But, more than any of the others, Ledger brings this film alive by going so deeply into his character you wonder if he'll be able to come back. Aside from his small but strong part in "Monster's Ball," nothing in the Australian-born Ledger's previous credits prepares us for the power and authenticity of his work here as a laconic, interior man of the West, a performance so persuasive that Brokeback Mountain could not have succeeded without it. Ennis' pain, his rage, his sense of longing and loss are real for the actor, and that makes them unforgettable for everyone else.
Mike Clark, USA TODAY "" Brokeback Mountain is the ultimate response to those who think the lineup on cable TV's Encore Westerns is a tad too homogenized. It's a heart-wrenching portrayal of unfulfilled Wyoming love, but this time, we don't mean Alan Ladd and Jean Arthur in Shane. From the ever unpeggable Ang Lee and adapted from an Annie Proulx short story, Mountain is a gay Western with a shot to become much more than a niche movie. Of course, when your directorial résumé includes Sense and Sensibility and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, you obviously know how to work the angles. And for renewed fire in his belly after his Hulk debacle, Lee now turns to more than campfire pork and beans. Modest in scale but with an epic feel, this 2&frac_one_quarter;-hour portrayal of star-crossed sheep tenders casts Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as two ill-educated drifters you sense at once will not be ending their days collecting corporate pensions. Ledger is halfway between inarticulate and taciturn but perhaps wiser than he initially seems. His more outgoing friend-turned-lover is a Texas rodeo cowboy with slightly more worldly experience. It's 1963, and the two are half-dumbstruck by their mutual passion. Ledger has severe childhood memories of violence against a gay resident of the beyond-rural burg where he was raised. After a languorous opening third, the movie soars for the duration as it dramatizes the fallout and periodic reunions from the pair's first and only idyllic summer laboring together. And alone. The Larry McMurtry-Diana Ossana screenplay, an Oscar-nomination lock, has the authentic feel of McMurtry's Lonesome Dove and The Last Picture Show as well as the cumulative power of his Terms of Endearment. For a movie the actors rightfully dominate, there are artfully developed female characters potently acted by Michelle Williams, Anne Hathaway and Linda Cardellini as wives and lovers either heart-broken over what's happening or cluelessly mystified. There's nothing fussy or attention-getting about Lee's direction or Rodrigo Prieto's photography, but the selection of shots and the rhythm of their cutting seem unerringly right. And while many of today's movies don't really end - you see a splice, and the end credits roll - the capper here is a kick in the gut. It's an old-style virtue for a film that's old-style in the best way: unassuming but people-oriented and aiming to endure.
Joe Morgenstern, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL One of the best lines in Ang Lee's beautiful Brokeback Mountain is the last line of the spare Annie Proulx short story that the movie was adapted from: "If you can't fix it you've got to stand it." The it is the dilemma faced by two cowboys, Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist. Ennis and Jack, who are played by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, love each other passionately. Yet they can't live together in the Marlboro Country of the 1960s and 1970s, so they try to hide their love behind shaky façades of heterosexual domesticity. The it is also the love itself, which at first seems baffling to these two manly men, as if it were a thing apart, rather than the force that gives meaning to their lives. Love stories come and go, but this one stays with you -- not because both lovers are men, but because their story is so full of life and longing, and true romance. The film takes its own good time getting started. Ennis and Jack meet when they're hired to herd sheep on the mountain of the title. Soon they've got all the time in the world to savor the glories of alpine Wyoming -- crystalline skies, wildflowers, snow showers, a slow-moving tide of sheep alongside a fast-running stream. They become part of the landscape, a pair of lonely, overgrown boys with tales of failure to tell and energy to burn. (Ennis, the taciturn one, turns downright garrulous in Jack's presence.) Their first sexual encounter grows out of huddling together in a pup tent to keep warm. It's explosive, animalistic and so unbidden that both men hasten to agree it was a "one-shot thing." Yet their bond will endure for a decade, which the film spans with bold leaps that may initially seem like disjunctures. "Brokeback Mountain" aspires to a
Jan Stuart, NEWSDAY "" When Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger wrestle their way into the sack together for the first time in Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain, they are ripping away at much more than their dirt-caked jeans. With one tumultuous lovemaking scene - it's more like love-attacking, actually - the two intrepid young actors manage to bust up several mythologies at once. The most obvious is the myth of the cowboy West, a land of manlier-than-thou men who release any pent-up longings with a quick stop at the local cathouse and a long drag on a Marlboro cigarette. The second - belied by the dizzying workload in store for both stars - is that complex, sexually active gay characters (as opposed to the minstrel-show buffoons that mince through The Producers) are a death knell for acting careers. The third to go is the wearying mythology of hype, the radical expectations of sexual explicitness stirred up by the film's triumphal march through film festivals in Venice and Toronto. On that score, we can all settle down a bit. If Lee stirs up the dust at all in his portrayal of two sheepherders in love, he does so through the most mainstream language available. Like many revolutionary acts of cinema, Brokeback Mountain disarms with weapons of mass instruction. Eloquently adapted by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana from Annie Proulx's New Yorker short story, Brokeback Mountain jumps off in 1963, when ranch hands Jack Twist (Gyllenhaal) and Ennis Del Mar (Ledger) sign on to herd sheep for a Montana rancher (Randy Quaid). The two strangers are, conventionally speaking, made for each other. Jack is personable, playful, a talker. Ennis is stoic and repressed, parceling out the gift of speech mostly to express how tired he is of eating beans. Their simmering mutual attraction overtakes them by surprise, in a violent coital burst. But it haunts them long after they have settled, hundreds of miles apart, into fitfully content married lives: Jack with a Texas businesswoman (Anne Hathaway) and Ennis with an adoring Montana house drudge (Michelle Williams). The loping first hour of Brokeback Mountain seduces the viewer with big-sky panoramas and bucolic sheepherding tableaux. We share the protagonists' sense of being liberated amid this Western paradise and lulled by the possibility of true romance. But as the men attempt to re-create their youthful Eden on the sly over the ensuing years, those big Montana expanses begin to feel suffocatingly hemmed-in. Ledger, secreting his lines from the sides of his mouth like a tongue-tied ventriloquist, most powerfully embodies the terror and entrapment felt by someone who lives his life in a state of emotional house-arrest. He's so convincingly tight-lipped, indeed, that I had to ask three people after the screening if they could tell me what his final line was. We are continually reminded that Ennis and Jack dwell in a time and culture where transgressive desire must be spoken of in code and where no illicit conduct goes unnoticed. Brokeback Mountain coaxes audiences to walk several hundred miles in its characters' shoes, luring us with the scent of forbidden fruit and rewarding us with the sumptuous taste of complex storytelling.
Mick LaSalle, THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE Brokeback Mountain is already being talked about as the "gay cowboy movie," shorthand that neither does it justice nor gives the right impression. It makes it sound either cavalier or easy to categorize, when the relationship depicted in the movie is a lot more complicated and difficult to pinpoint. It's about two men who are in love, and it makes no sense. It makes no sense in terms of who they are, where they are, how they live and how they see themselves. It makes no sense in terms of what they do for a living or how they would probably vote in a national election. It makes no sense, except in one place in the world, the place where it started, on Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming. And though they come down from that mountain and go about their lives, they keep going back to it, over the course of years, because however much the love doesn't make sense, it's real - so real, it makes their lives unreal. There are kids, marriages, jobs, nights of drinking, heterosexual flings, in-laws and holidays to celebrate, and they do everything they're expected to do, but numb. Then every so often, they meet back up on the mountain and get to be themselves for a few stolen days. The situation carries a lot of emotional power, largely because it's so specific and yet undefined. The two guys - cowboys - are in love with each other, but we don't ever quite know if they're in love with each other because they're gay, or if they're gay because they're in love with each other. It's possible that if these fellows had never met, one or both would have gone through life straight. That's one way of looking at the movie, though only one. In any case, because their attraction is not defined as some inevitable consequence of sexual orientation but as something that just happens to them, we see them as irreplaceable to each other - like Romeo and Juliet. There's no notion that either could go out tomorrow or 10 years from now and find someone else. Brokeback Mountain, based on Annie Proulx's 1997 story, is directed by Ang Lee in a style that pays attention to the nuances of expression, to the thoughts and emotions being articulated between the words and in the pauses. This is necessary, because cowboys don't do much talking. Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal play Ennis and Jack, respectively, who meet when they're hired to tend a herd of sheep in Wyoming in 1963. They're both tight-lipped fellows, but Ledger is the more closed off of the two. He adopts a manner of speaking that suggests repression, a pressing down of the vocal cords as though jealous of any word that might escape. It's up to interpretation whether he knows, at first, the thing that he's trying to hide. In any case, nature will out, and it does one night, with a suddenness bordering on violence, when the two men share a tent. The idea of two Marlboro men having sex in a tent is, in itself, an unexpected twist on a traditional image of American manhood. They cook beans, make coffee, share rodeo stories and do all the things that cowboys usually do. They are Western outdoorsmen in the true American tradition, and they can't be transplanted, which makes their love all the more difficult. You can't be a gay couple in a small Western town in 1963, and you can't be a cowboy in New York or San Francisco. Both actors do memorable work, but Ledger has the better role, and he makes the strongest choices. He gives Ennis a voice and mannerisms that are utterly idiosyncratic, and then inhabits those choices psychologically, making sense of the locked-down speech, the haunted look and the strong but diffident manner. He completely transforms himself. It's a performance that was thought through in detail and then lived in the moment, and it's one of the most beautiful things in movies this year. Lee's attention to the unspoken carries over into the domestic scenes, of the men with their respective wives. As with the men, there are things the wives don't dare say out loud, as well, but we can read their thoughts and see the toll the years take. Anne Hathaway, the star of the innocuous Princess Diaries movies, plays Jack's wife, in a committed portrait of a woman getting blonder and blonder, and more bitter and pinched, over the course of some 15 years. It's a brilliant and insightful performance, a time-lapse photography demonstration of what happens to someone who expected to be loved, but wasn't.
Stephen Holden, 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 of two cowboys who fall in love almost by accident. It is embedded in the craggy landscape where their idyll begins and ends. It creeps into the farthest corners of the wide-open spaces they share with coyotes, bears and herds of sheep and rises like a stifled cry into the big, empty sky that stretches beyond the horizon.
One night, when their campfire dies, and the biting cold drives them to huddle together in a bedroll, a sudden spark between Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) flares into an undying flame.
The same mood of acute desolation permeates the spare, gnarly prose of Annie Proulx's short story, first published in The New Yorker in 1997, adapted by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. Mr. McMurtry knows about loneliness. Its ache suffused his novel and his screenplay for "The Last Picture Show," made into a film 34 years ago by Peter Bogdanovich.
The sexual bouts between these two ranch hands who have never heard the term gay (in 1963, when the story begins, it was still a code word transiting into the mainstream) are described by Ms. Proulx as "quick, rough, laughing and snorting."
That's exactly how Mr. Lee films their first sexual grappling (discreetly) in the shadows of the cramped little tent. The next morning, Ennis mumbles, "I'm no queer." And Jack replies, "Me neither." Still, they do it again, and again, in the daylight as well as at night. Sometimes their pent-up passions explode in ferocious roughhouse that is indistinguishable from fighting.
This moving and majestic film would be a landmark if only because it is the first Hollywood movie to unmask the homoerotic strain in American culture that Leslie Fiedler discerned in his notorious 1948 Partisan Review essay, "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey." Fiedler characterized the bond between Huckleberry Finn and Jim, a runaway slave, as an unconscious romantic attachment shared by two males of different races as they flee the more constraining and civilizing domain of women. He went on to identify that bond as a recurrent theme in American literature.
In popular culture, Fiedler's Freudianism certainly could be applied to the Lone Ranger and Tonto. Minus the ethnic division, it might also be widened to include a long line of westerns and buddy movies, from Red River to Midnight Cowboy to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: the pure male bonding that dare not explore its shadow side.
Ennis and Jack's 20-year romance begins when they are hired in the summer of 1963 by Joe Aguirre (Randy Quaid), a hard-boiled rancher, to work as sheepherders on Brokeback Mountain in the Wyoming high country. (The movie was filmed in Alberta, in the Canadian Rockies.) Subsisting mostly on canned beans and whiskey, the two cowboys develop a boozy friendship by the campfire.
So taciturn and bottled up that he swallows his syllables as he pulls words out of his mouth in gruff, reluctant grunts, Ennis tells Jack of being raised by a brother and sister after his parents died in a car crash; Jack, brought up in the rodeo, is more talkative and recalls his lifelong alienation from his father, a bull rider.
When signs of an early blizzard cut short their summer employment, Ennis and Jack go their separate ways; Ennis's farewell is a simple "See you around." Both, though, are torn up. Ennis marries his girlfriend, Alma (Michelle Williams), and they have two daughters. Jack meets and marries Lureen (Anne Hathaway), a Texan rodeo queen, with whom he has a son, and joins her father's farm-equipment business.
Four years pass before Jack, who is living in Texas, sends a general-delivery postcard to Ennis, who has settled in Wyoming, saying he will be in the area and would like to visit. The instant they set eyes on each other, their suspended passion erupts into a spontaneous clinch. Alma sees it all, and her face, from that moment on, remains frozen in misery. The reunited lovers rush to a motel.
So begins a sporadic and tormented affair in which the two meet once or twice a year for fishing trips on which no fish are caught. Jack urges that they forsake their marriages and set up a ranch together. But Ennis, haunted by a childhood memory of his father taking him to see the mutilated body of a rancher, tortured and beaten to death with a tire iron for living with another man, is immobilized by fear and shame.
Both Mr. Ledger and Mr. Gyllenhaal make this anguished love story physically palpable. Mr. Ledger magically and mysteriously disappears beneath the skin of his lean, sinewy character. It is a great screen performance, as good as the best of Marlon Brando and Sean Penn. The pain and disappointment felt by Jack, who is softer, more self-aware and self-accepting, continually registers in Mr. Gyllenhaal's sad, expectant silver-dollar eyes.
The second half of the movie opens up Ms. Proulx's story to follow both men's slowly crumbling marriages. For years, Alma chokes on her pain until one day, after she and Ennis have divorced, it rises up as if she were strangling on her own bile. As Jack, desperately frustrated, has clandestine encounters with other men, Ms. Hathaway's Lureen slowly calcifies into a clenched robotic shell of her peppery younger self.
Brokeback Mountain is not quite the period piece that some would like to imagine. America's squeaky closet doors may have swung open far enough for a gay rodeo circuit to flourish. But let's not kid ourselves. In large segments of American society, especially in sports and the military, those doors remain sealed. The murder of Matthew Shepard, after all, took place in Brokeback territory. Another recent film, Jarhead (in which Mr. Gyllenhaal plays a marine), suggests how any kind of male behavior perceived as soft and feminine within certain closed male environments triggers abuse and violence and how that repression of sexual energy is directly channeled into warfare.
Yet Brokeback Mountain is ultimately not about sex (there is very little of it in the film) but about love: love stumbled into, love thwarted, love held sorrowfully in the heart.
Or, as Ms. Proulx writes, "What Jack remembered and craved in a way he could neither help nor understand was the time that distant summer on Brokeback when Ennis had come up behind him and pulled him close, the silent embrace satisfying some shared and sexless hunger."
One tender moment's reprieve from loneliness can illuminate a life.
Kenneth Turan, LA TIMES
Brokeback Mountain is a groundbreaking film because it isn't. It's a deeply felt, emotional love story that deals with the uncharted, mysterious ways of the human heart just as so many mainstream films have before it. The two lovers here just happen to be men.
Big star vehicles with homosexual protagonists are, of course, not new; one of them, 1993's "Philadelphia," even won a best actor Oscar for star Tom Hanks. But these films invariably have had an air of earnest special pleading about them, a sense that they'd rather do good in the world than tell a good story. Instead of emphasizing its apartness, Brokeback Mountain insists it is a romance like any other, and that makes all the difference.
Confidently directed by Ang Lee and featuring sensitive and powerful performances by Jake Gyllenhaal and a breathtaking Heath Ledger, this film is determined to involve us in the naturalness and even inevitability of its epic, complicated love story. What Larry McMurtry (who co-wrote the screenplay with Diana Ossana) said of Pulitzer Prize winner E. Annie Proulx's original short fiction is equally true of the film: "It was a story that had been sitting there for years, waiting to be told."
That lack of affect befits the nature of its protagonists, who begin as a pair of 19-year-old cowboys in Wyoming ranch country circa 1963. In Proulx's words, Ennis del Mar (Ledger) and Jack Twist (Gyllenhaal) were "rough-mannered, rough-spoken, inured to the stoic life," men who would mightily resist an avowedly gay lifestyle or even the label homosexual. Even after sex, Ennis could insist "I'm not no queer," with Jack adding, "Me neither. A one-shot thing. Nobody's business but ours." If great love stories are about obstacles (and they often are), this one has them to spare.
"Brokeback Mountain" had obstacles of its own to contend with. Screenwriters McMurtry and Ossana optioned the story of this enduring relationship and wrote the script soon after it appeared in the New Yorker in 1997. But the "scary and sensitive" nature of the project (Ang Lee's words) meant that it took eight years to reach the screen. Sometimes, however, good things really do come to those who are forced to wait, and it is difficult to imagine a team better suited to transferring "Brokeback Mountain" to the screen than the one that finally emerged, starting with director Lee.
A Taiwanese native, Lee is completely at home in the widest variety of situations, from the mythical China of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" to the 18th century England of Jane Austen's "Sense and Sensibility." There is often something spare and removed in his direction, a willingness to be pulled back and deliberate, and those qualities enhance this film's ability to be direct and uncluttered in telling Ennis and Jack's story.
Even for a chameleon such as Lee, "Brokeback Mountain" has an impeccable sense of the rhythms and vistas of the remote West, a feeling for its lonely vastness and godforsaken settlements as well as its expansive beauty. For this credit the gifted Mexican cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (Amores Perros, 21 Grams) and, of course, original voice Proulx and screenwriters McMurtry and Ossana.
Taking their cues from the source, which McMurtry has called "one of the finest short stories I've read ... drawn precisely and convincingly," the writing partners have fleshed out the characters and the situations very much in the spirit of Proulx's work. It can at times seem like a bit of a stretch to expand a 31-page story into a two hour and 14 minute movie, but in fact it is the film's patience with its material that creates its effect. For although an affair like this may seem arbitrary if heard about in the abstract or even if viewed in unconnected coming attraction clips, watching it gradually develop on screen, unfolding with a quiet, step-by-step naturalness, makes it emotionally convincing. Taking time, not being in a hurry, lends credibility to a destination everyone but the protagonists know is coming.
Ennis and Jack meet each other in front of a trailer office in Signal, Wyo., where they're hired by rancher Joe Aguirre (a properly dyspeptic Randy Quaid) to spend the summer watching over a large herd of sheep on Brokeback Mountain. Though both men are laconic and wedded to the cowboy life (Ennis wants to be a rancher, Jack a rodeo bull-rider), there are differences between them. Jack is the showier character, the livelier wire, while Ennis is somber and grounded, the boy orphaned young who never came to trust the world.
Alone in nature's grandness, they are drawn to each other almost without their knowing it's happening. When the intimacy between them takes hold, it is graphic, candid, unapologetic. As Proulx writes of a later kiss, passion seizes them "easily as the right key turns the lock tumblers." Yet, as the film is at pains to insist, it is a lonely passion that has no place in their world. Theirs is a bond unlike anything either man has known before: not because it's a same-sex relationship but because of the strength of the feelings involved. Their closeness perplexes, confounds and confuses Ennis and Jack; it's something they can neither explain nor control.
The summer ends and both men go off to the rest of their lives. Ennis marries his sweetheart Alma (Michelle Williams), and Jack, moving to Texas, falls into a marriage with Lureen (Anne Hathaway), a rodeo rider with a well-to-do father. They think that what happened on Brokeback Mountain is over, but it is not. For what Ennis and Jack reluctantly come to realize is that, all unawares, they have stumbled into the great love of their lives, with all the problems and complications that implies for themselves and the others in their life. In a profound sense, because of the pressures of the time and place they live in, they are lost whether together or apart, riven by the agonizing longing they feel, by the chances not taken and the choices just out of reach.
Brokeback Mountain would not be the success it is without excellent acting across the board. Though he is hampered by an unconvincing aging job, Gyllenhaal brings a fine harum-scarum energy and feeling to Jack's character, and Williams, glummer than she ever was in "The Station Agent," illuminates all the corners of Alma's sadness. But, more than any of the others, Ledger brings this film alive by going so deeply into his character you wonder if he'll be able to come back. Aside from his small but strong part in "Monster's Ball," nothing in the Australian-born Ledger's previous credits prepares us for the power and authenticity of his work here as a laconic, interior man of the West, a performance so persuasive that Brokeback Mountain could not have succeeded without it. Ennis' pain, his rage, his sense of longing and loss are real for the actor, and that makes them unforgettable for everyone else.
Mike Clark, USA TODAY
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Brokeback Mountain is the ultimate response to those who think the lineup on cable TV's Encore Westerns is a tad too homogenized. It's a heart-wrenching portrayal of unfulfilled Wyoming love, but this time, we don't mean Alan Ladd and Jean Arthur in Shane.
From the ever unpeggable Ang Lee and adapted from an Annie Proulx short story, Mountain is a gay Western with a shot to become much more than a niche movie. Of course, when your directorial résumé includes Sense and Sensibility and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, you obviously know how to work the angles. And for renewed fire in his belly after his Hulk debacle, Lee now turns to more than campfire pork and beans.
Modest in scale but with an epic feel, this 2&frac_one_quarter;-hour portrayal of star-crossed sheep tenders casts Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as two ill-educated drifters you sense at once will not be ending their days collecting corporate pensions. Ledger is halfway between inarticulate and taciturn but perhaps wiser than he initially seems. His more outgoing friend-turned-lover is a Texas rodeo cowboy with slightly more worldly experience.
It's 1963, and the two are half-dumbstruck by their mutual passion. Ledger has severe childhood memories of violence against a gay resident of the beyond-rural burg where he was raised.
After a languorous opening third, the movie soars for the duration as it dramatizes the fallout and periodic reunions from the pair's first and only idyllic summer laboring together. And alone.
The Larry McMurtry-Diana Ossana screenplay, an Oscar-nomination lock, has the authentic feel of McMurtry's Lonesome Dove and The Last Picture Show as well as the cumulative power of his Terms of Endearment. For a movie the actors rightfully dominate, there are artfully developed female characters potently acted by Michelle Williams, Anne Hathaway and Linda Cardellini as wives and lovers either heart-broken over what's happening or cluelessly mystified.
There's nothing fussy or attention-getting about Lee's direction or Rodrigo Prieto's photography, but the selection of shots and the rhythm of their cutting seem unerringly right. And while many of today's movies don't really end - you see a splice, and the end credits roll - the capper here is a kick in the gut. It's an old-style virtue for a film that's old-style in the best way: unassuming but people-oriented and aiming to endure.
Joe Morgenstern,
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
One of the best lines in Ang Lee's beautiful Brokeback Mountain is the last line of the spare Annie Proulx short story that the movie was adapted from: "If you can't fix it you've got to stand it." The it is the dilemma faced by two cowboys, Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist. Ennis and Jack, who are played by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, love each other passionately. Yet they can't live together in the Marlboro Country of the 1960s and 1970s, so they try to hide their love behind shaky façades of heterosexual domesticity. The it is also the love itself, which at first seems baffling to these two manly men, as if it were a thing apart, rather than the force that gives meaning to their lives. Love stories come and go, but this one stays with you -- not because both lovers are men, but because their story is so full of life and longing, and true romance.
The film takes its own good time getting started. Ennis and Jack meet when they're hired to herd sheep on the mountain of the title. Soon they've got all the time in the world to savor the glories of alpine Wyoming -- crystalline skies, wildflowers, snow showers, a slow-moving tide of sheep alongside a fast-running stream. They become part of the landscape, a pair of lonely, overgrown boys with tales of failure to tell and energy to burn. (Ennis, the taciturn one, turns downright garrulous in Jack's presence.) Their first sexual encounter grows out of huddling together in a pup tent to keep warm. It's explosive, animalistic and so unbidden that both men hasten to agree it was a "one-shot thing." Yet their bond will endure for a decade, which the film spans with bold leaps that may initially seem like disjunctures. "Brokeback Mountain" aspires to a
Jan Stuart, NEWSDAY
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When Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger wrestle their way into the sack together for the first time in Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain, they are ripping away at much more than their dirt-caked jeans. With one tumultuous lovemaking scene - it's more like love-attacking, actually - the two intrepid young actors manage to bust up several mythologies at once.
The most obvious is the myth of the cowboy West, a land of manlier-than-thou men who release any pent-up longings with a quick stop at the local cathouse and a long drag on a Marlboro cigarette.
The second - belied by the dizzying workload in store for both stars - is that complex, sexually active gay characters (as opposed to the minstrel-show buffoons that mince through The Producers) are a death knell for acting careers.
The third to go is the wearying mythology of hype, the radical expectations of sexual explicitness stirred up by the film's triumphal march through film festivals in Venice and Toronto.
On that score, we can all settle down a bit. If Lee stirs up the dust at all in his portrayal of two sheepherders in love, he does so through the most mainstream language available. Like many revolutionary acts of cinema, Brokeback Mountain disarms with weapons of mass instruction.
Eloquently adapted by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana from Annie Proulx's New Yorker short story, Brokeback Mountain jumps off in 1963, when ranch hands Jack Twist (Gyllenhaal) and Ennis Del Mar (Ledger) sign on to herd sheep for a Montana rancher (Randy Quaid).
The two strangers are, conventionally speaking, made for each other. Jack is personable, playful, a talker. Ennis is stoic and repressed, parceling out the gift of speech mostly to express how tired he is of eating beans.
Their simmering mutual attraction overtakes them by surprise, in a violent coital burst. But it haunts them long after they have settled, hundreds of miles apart, into fitfully content married lives: Jack with a Texas businesswoman (Anne Hathaway) and Ennis with an adoring Montana house drudge (Michelle Williams).
The loping first hour of Brokeback Mountain seduces the viewer with big-sky panoramas and bucolic sheepherding tableaux. We share the protagonists' sense of being liberated amid this Western paradise and lulled by the possibility of true romance. But as the men attempt to re-create their youthful Eden on the sly over the ensuing years, those big Montana expanses begin to feel suffocatingly hemmed-in.
Ledger, secreting his lines from the sides of his mouth like a tongue-tied ventriloquist, most powerfully embodies the terror and entrapment felt by someone who lives his life in a state of emotional house-arrest.
He's so convincingly tight-lipped, indeed, that I had to ask three people after the screening if they could tell me what his final line was.
We are continually reminded that Ennis and Jack dwell in a time and culture where transgressive desire must be spoken of in code and where no illicit conduct goes unnoticed. Brokeback Mountain coaxes audiences to walk several hundred miles in its characters' shoes, luring us with the scent of forbidden fruit and rewarding us with the sumptuous taste of complex storytelling.
Mick LaSalle,
THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
Brokeback Mountain is already being talked about as the "gay cowboy movie," shorthand that neither does it justice nor gives the right impression. It makes it sound either cavalier or easy to categorize, when the relationship depicted in the movie is a lot more complicated and difficult to pinpoint.
It's about two men who are in love, and it makes no sense. It makes no sense in terms of who they are, where they are, how they live and how they see themselves. It makes no sense in terms of what they do for a living or how they would probably vote in a national election.
It makes no sense, except in one place in the world, the place where it started, on Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming. And though they come down from that mountain and go about their lives, they keep going back to it, over the course of years, because however much the love doesn't make sense, it's real - so real, it makes their lives unreal. There are kids, marriages, jobs, nights of drinking, heterosexual flings, in-laws and holidays to celebrate, and they do everything they're expected to do, but numb. Then every so often, they meet back up on the mountain and get to be themselves for a few stolen days.
The situation carries a lot of emotional power, largely because it's so specific and yet undefined. The two guys - cowboys - are in love with each other, but we don't ever quite know if they're in love with each other because they're gay, or if they're gay because they're in love with each other.
It's possible that if these fellows had never met, one or both would have gone through life straight. That's one way of looking at the movie, though only one. In any case, because their attraction is not defined as some inevitable consequence of sexual orientation but as something that just happens to them, we see them as irreplaceable to each other - like Romeo and Juliet. There's no notion that either could go out tomorrow or 10 years from now and find someone else.
Brokeback Mountain, based on Annie Proulx's 1997 story, is directed by Ang Lee in a style that pays attention to the nuances of expression, to the thoughts and emotions being articulated between the words and in the pauses. This is necessary, because cowboys don't do much talking. Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal play Ennis and Jack, respectively, who meet when they're hired to tend a herd of sheep in Wyoming in 1963. They're both tight-lipped fellows, but Ledger is the more closed off of the two. He adopts a manner of speaking that suggests repression, a pressing down of the vocal cords as though jealous of any word that might escape. It's up to interpretation whether he knows, at first, the thing that he's trying to hide. In any case, nature will out, and it does one night, with a suddenness bordering on violence, when the two men share a tent.
The idea of two Marlboro men having sex in a tent is, in itself, an unexpected twist on a traditional image of American manhood. They cook beans, make coffee, share rodeo stories and do all the things that cowboys usually do. They are Western outdoorsmen in the true American tradition, and they can't be transplanted, which makes their love all the more difficult. You can't be a gay couple in a small Western town in 1963, and you can't be a cowboy in New York or San Francisco.
Both actors do memorable work, but Ledger has the better role, and he makes the strongest choices. He gives Ennis a voice and mannerisms that are utterly idiosyncratic, and then inhabits those choices psychologically, making sense of the locked-down speech, the haunted look and the strong but diffident manner. He completely transforms himself. It's a performance that was thought through in detail and then lived in the moment, and it's one of the most beautiful things in movies this year.
Lee's attention to the unspoken carries over into the domestic scenes, of the men with their respective wives. As with the men, there are things the wives don't dare say out loud, as well, but we can read their thoughts and see the toll the years take. Anne Hathaway, the star of the innocuous Princess Diaries movies, plays Jack's wife, in a committed portrait of a woman getting blonder and blonder, and more bitter and pinched, over the course of some 15 years. It's a brilliant and insightful performance, a time-lapse photography demonstration of what happens to someone who expected to be loved, but wasn't.