Jake Gyllenhaal, who co-stars with Heath Ledger in "Brokeback Mountain", poses in front of the film's poster at the Los Angeles premiere of the film Tuesday, Nov. 29, 2005. The film won the Golden Lion Award for Best Picture at the 2005 Venice International Film Festival.
Love Lost on Mountain By Penny Remick, 01.26.06
“Brokeback Mountain” is based on E. Annie Proulx’s short story, set in a scarcely inhabited Wyoming town, 1963. It is a story about connection, decision, fate, fortitude and death in life.
Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal, "Jarhead") and Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger, in "Cassanova") are poor in soul and pocket money. Both come from an unforgettably harsh upbringing, one abandoned by his parents, the other raised by an insatiable father.
Jack and Ennis share biographical snippets on green undulating mountain, while playing mother to a thousand sheep. The wind, cold and rain blast against their effort to sustain a routine watch; death begins to show itself in the loss of one sheep who lies in waste, exposed and gutted. The loss is but one of the many metaphorical scenes, which shapes Larry McCurty’s screenplay throughout the film.
Jack takes pity on Ennis one night as Ennis is half-frozen beside a blackened fire, and he orders Ennis much as a parent to a child to get inside shelter and out from the cold. Jack wants to afford Ennis what affection he has at liberty to give away, and in a quiet moment, he moves Ennis to take advantage of him. Although Ennis seems both mortified and alarmed, a more powerful force rules him, and he yields to a sexual encounter with Jack, which changes him in a moment, forever.
Alma, Ennis’ innocent bride (Michelle Williams, “The Hawk is Dying”) helps Ennis live a regular poor man’s life, bears him two girls, and they live in a bleak, crusty ranch away from town, just the way Ennis’ likes it.
Jack comes for a visit, which fires every Cupid’s arrow straight through Ennis’s heart. Ennis is positively enthralled by Jack. There is a connection between them, which they are as unlikely to explain as anyone, for it torments them throughout, and they had rather be dead than alive to see it through. Alma happens upon Ennis and Jack violently embracing at the first long-awaited reunion, and she has, like all the female actors in this film, no voice.
Like captured sheep in a sea of cowboy coyotes, the men’s lives are mutilated and left exposed on the plains, far away from the heaven they have known on Brokeback Mountain.
The audience may try to remember the year the story takes place. It is the same year that Martin Luther King makes his, “I Have a Dream” speech in D.C., the same year President John F. Kennedy is assasinated. Civil rights leaders are being murdered. The Vietnam War is well under way. It is a strange time to live, and a good time to die.
Director Ang Lee (“The Incredible Hulk,” “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”) superbly draws the audience into the film by framing close up shots of Jack and Ennis, and Ennis with Alma, which causes the audience to connect intimately with both the relationship of the men, as well as to the marital disconnect. Lee also manages to capture the utterly voluminous echo of loneliness in Jack and Ennis, a feeling not easily dismissed upon exiting the theater doors. Lee has conjured up real human beings, the most genuine acting in movie-viewing recollection.
Patricia Cuccia, set decorator, creates plain, broad backgrounds with minimal ornamentation, making a disconnection of places. She uses hard edges and starkness as a signal to describe Jack’s hard place in life from an early beginning, as well as the struggle of Ennis family as a consequence of his working at odd jobs.
Larry McMurty, screenwriter, (won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel “Lonesome Dove”) does a fine job of sticking close to the original story, and he in fact uses dialogue unscathed in much of the film.
“Brokeback Mountain” is a historical slice of life with an enduring message about human suffering and the need we all have to be connected to someone who loves and cares for us.
