Some films accumulate an emotional residue over time; rather than diminishing, their impact deepens and intensifies with each screening. When I first saw Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain in 2005 – a movie I’d been anticipating since a “gay cowboy” project was first announced – my response was subdued. I remember telling a friend who’d asked what I thought that it was beautiful in the way a landscape painting is beautiful: lush and precisely detailed, but emotionally spare. These days, I can’t hear the opening strains of Gustavo Santaolalla’s poignant score without weeping.
Beautiful landscape is, of course, a central feature of the film, tantalising and talismanic. The quietly stunning Wyoming countryside is not only where our cowboys fall in love – mercurial and passionate Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) and taciturn and self-loathing Ennis del Mar (Heath Ledger) – it represents the kind of emotional freedom and acceptance they can’t find in the prosaic interiors of their upbringing. Brokeback Mountain (a fictional location invented by author Annie Proulx in the award-winning short story on which the film is based) releases something in the men, then mocks them for not living up to its Edenic promise.
It’s highly significant that the film opens in 1963 and spans a 20-year period of marriages, kids and divorce before ending in secrecy and heartbreak. This was a time of enormous progress for gay men in America who’d fought for and won legal protections across the country. But for Jack and Ennis – who can’t even conceive of a world that tolerates, let alone actively celebrates, their love – this progress might as well be happening on the moon. It’s a salient reminder that what we think of as an LGBTQI+ community is largely a metropolitan, middle-class construct.
Those long opening scenes on Brokeback – where the men herd sheep, wash clothes in the river and make love in a tent – unfold languorously, as if taking their cue from the natural world; the pacing here is stately, deliberate. But as the men return to their separate lives and deep dive into the deception of heterosexuality, time seems to quicken. No sooner do we see Ennis marrying Alma (Michelle Williams) in a pokey Riverton chapel than the couple are drowning under the domestic weight of kids, bills and dead-end jobs. Jack’s furtive “romance” with Lureen (Anne Hathaway, all angles and eye rolls) also proceeds at a pace, as if keen to paper over cracks. Lee does this often in the film, telescoping time whenever the men are away from the mountain; the effect is of whole lives slipping through the protagonists’ fingers.
One of the things that strikes me rewatching the film is how specific and tactile the worlds Lee brings to life are (aided enormously by production designer Judy Becker); from the shoddy trailers and rusted pickups of Ennis’s existence to the depressing austerity of Jack’s family home. Lee has always been a master of mise-en-scene; he uses it not just to locate and excavate character, but to suggest elaborate and highly charged social milieux. This is vital in a film like Brokeback Mountain, where societal conventions are as immutable and constrictive as gravity. What we now understand as toxic masculinity, its stultifying narrowness and self-inflicting misery, pervades every frame; rigid constructs around gender are as scrupulously upheld as anything in Edith Wharton or Henry James.
The cast are superb, the whole film littered with performances of astonishing depth and suppleness. I’d forgotten Kate Mara’s emergent, wide-eyed Alma Jr, wondering what exactly it is that keeps her father at arm’s length. David Harbour and Anna Faris as hopelessly entrapped married couple Randall and Lashawn Malone. Williams is heartbreaking, doe-eyed and desperate and Hathaway is terrific, her insouciance hardening to steel in the face of her husband’s vast unknowability.
Straight actors playing gay characters might have become more controversial since the film’s release (although it’s hardly in abeyance), but this never bothered me much because I could always feel the abiding respect and compassion coming from the entire creative team. Gyllenhaal and Ledger don’t “play gay” at all; the boys’ sexuality isn’t an identity to them, but something akin to a topographical detail, as inscrutable as a mountain.
Gyllenhaal is brilliant as the tortured and tenacious Jack, allowing hints of another, freer self to shine through the increasing bitterness and despair. When Brokeback was released, US film critic Gene Shalit called Jack “a sexual predator” – which highlights the straight world’s willingness to see criminality in gay desire – but he’s really a lover in the high romantic sense, chivalric and steadfast. Ledger’s Ennis is an inversion of Jack, his chivalry petrified into stoicism and self-denial. He mumbles and shuffles, hemmed and corralled like one of the sheep, his jaw locked and his gaze shifting. It’s a remarkable portrait of a young man disappearing into himself.
Brokeback Mountain was nominated for eight Oscars and won three, but – in a move most of us at the time interpreted as a deliberate snub – lost best picture to the tediously didactic and self-congratulatory Crash. That decision looks downright silly now, as Lee’s film has taken its rightful place among cinema’s masterpieces, entering the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry in 2018 for being “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant”. It seems that love only grows stronger with time.
Brokeback Mountain is available to stream on Binge (Australia) and Paramount+ (US/UK). For more recommendations of what to stream in Australia, click here
