Brokeback Mountain

Ang Lee has always made setting a primary focus in his films. Whether it is the Kansas prairie in Ride with the Devil, the frozen suburban night-time wasteland of The Ice Storm, the romantic, mythic world of martial arts legendry in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, or the austere, distant vistas of Wyoming's mountains in Brokeback Mountain. Landscape is always in the background. The characters are in the foreground. But landscape to some extent defines what they do, who they are. In Brokeback Mountain the two main characters both associate their love for one another with the mountain where they first herded sheep together.

Many reviewers have praised Jake Gyllenhaal’s acting as Jack Twist in Brokeback Mountain. He was very good, but I thought Heath Ledger as Ennis Del Mar was remarkable. Inarticulate in every way, his frozen face as he struggled to make the simplest statements had an absolute elegance and expressiveness. I saw him as the film’s main character, more so than Gyllenhaal. In fact, Gyllenhaal’s story is told through Heath’s eyes and memory.

I can see the point of the The New Yorker reviewer’s observation that you do not spend much time thinking about Ennis and Jack as gay lovers. The problems they face are not limited to sexual preference. Both of them marry conventionally and become parents. Both marriages go bad in different ways, not only because the men love one another, not merely because of infidelity. Ennis’ never makes much money, and his family for many years lives in bare surroundings. His wife is unhappy and dissatisfied from an early point, not only because she sees Ennis and Jack embracing one another (though she never tells Ennis this until long after their divorce), but because she and Ennis can never get ahead, they both work jobs they don’t particularly enjoy, and they become mired in a particular kind of domestic despair that is hardly limited to the situations we see in this film.

Jack marries the daughter of a wealthy farm equipment dealer. She comes on to him, attracted by his rodeo riding. He marries her because marriage in Wyoming is what a young man (or woman) does. There is no alternative. Though he succeeds as a farm equipment salesman, his marriage never seems happy, while Ennis’ for a time does. Long before he met Jack, Ennis planned to marry the woman who become his wife. He never expected the kinds of complications which he encountered. Jack is irritated by his father-in-law’s insistence on being the authority figure, the head of the household, and Jack never seems to break out of the role of the wealthy owner’s son-in-law. Everything he achieves, more or less, owes to that role. His wife becomes increasingly cold and brittle, caught up in the family business, in the social affairs of their lives. For her there is no alternative to that of mother and wife. By the end of the film, she has become a frightening character, but like everyone in the film she is a product of environment. Forces of respectability, propriety, social status control her, and this is nowhere more evident in the scene where she lies to Ennis about how her husband dies. She is portrayed by Anne Hathaway, a young actress best known before this film for her roles in such made-for-the-young Disney or Disneyesque films as The Princess Diaries and Ella Enchanted. This role proves she can play mainstream roles, and it was not until late in the film that I realized who she was.

Yet sexual preference, prevailing social and moral codes, the forces of environment against the needs and desires of those who do not fit preformed niches of behavior and inclination, are at the heart of this film. The film does not allow you to overlook them, nor does it leave you unaware of what might happen to Jack or Ennis if the truth comes out about them. In one way or the other they suffer for their relationship throughout the film—through the necessity of stealth and deception, through their lies to their family, through the sheep owner who refuses to hire Jack again after he has spied on him with Ennis, through their unhappy and cold marriages, through the impossibility of their being together on a permanent basis, through the way Jack meets his death, through Ennis’ loneliness at the end. The setting, the cold remote mountains of Wyoming, which are the backdrop for much of the story, are like the cold remote environment in which the characters live. I was reminded at times of Thomas Hardy, in novels like Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, where the world weighs in and weighs down and smothers the lives of the characters until there is no life left.

Ang Lee is intensely interested in the social and environmental forces that encircle and circumscribe human character and action. This was in a sense the essential subject of The Ice Storm, so much so that the film had a kind of clinical indifference to the human beings entrapped in the story. It was obvious in the 1995 adaptation of Sense and Sensibility. We see it in Brokeback Mountain in numerous ways, but the film does not leave you distant and uncaring about the main characters, even when you can guess what is likely to happen to them.

It seemed to me in the film that while Jack needed the company of other men, and sought it out on occasion by trips to Mexico where he could buy the services of male prostitutes, Ennis was in love with Jack specifically. This explains at least one of the arguments between Ennis and Jack late in the film, and of course explains the nature of Jack’s death. Ennis feels betrayed when Jack tells him that he has been with other men. I’m not sure that being with men other than Jack has ever occurred to Ennis. He planned to marry the girl he married, and to have a conventional life.

This is a well made film with fine acting, a beautiful setting, and deeply disturbing and depressing concerns. It may not be a classic for the ages, but it is important for the serious way it grapples with its subject, its avoidance of platitudes and stereotypes, its way of viewing Jack and Ennis and the others around them not as symbols of a social issue but as suffering human beings.