Men in Love: Is Brokeback Mountain a gay film?

Dec. 9, 2005 | The premise of Ang Lee's "Brokeback Mountain," based on an Annie Proulx short story, is something we've never seen before in a mainstream picture: In 1963 two young cowboys meet on the job and, amid a great deal of confusion and denial, as well as many fervent declarations of their immutable heterosexuality, fall in love. Their names -- straight out of a boy's adventure book of the 1930s, or maybe just the result of a long think on the front porch at some writers' colony -- are Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger).

The attraction between Jack and Ennis is at first timid and muted, the sort of thing that might have amounted to nothing more than a vague, sleep-swollen fantasy. But when they finally give in to that attraction, in a cramped tent out in rural Wyoming -- the sheep they're supposed to be guarding are far off on a hillside, most likely being circled by lip-smacking coyotes -- the very sound of their urgent unbuckling and unzipping is like a ghost whistling across the plains, foretelling doom and pleasure and everything in between.

This early section of "Brokeback Mountain," in which the men's minimal verbal communication transmutes into a very intimate sort of carnal chemistry, is the most affecting and believable part of the movie, partly because young love is almost always touching, and partly because for these cowboys -- living in a very conventional corner of the world, in a very conventional time -- the stakes are particularly high. Later in the movie, Ennis will recount a story from his childhood, in which a rancher who'd set up house with another man was viciously murdered. (Ennis' father made sure the boy saw the mutilated corpse, a way of scaring the kid into growing up straight.) Jack and Ennis are, after all, risking their lives for love.

But by the time the 134 minutes of "Brokeback Mountain" have ticked by, the stark, craggy poetry of its beginning feels like a faraway, rearview-mirror memory -- an echo of the way Jack, after first meeting Ennis, surreptitiously scrutinizes him in a car's side mirror. "Brokeback Mountain" takes great pains to be a compassionate love story; but the filmmaking itself, self-consciously restrained and desiccated, is inert and inexpressive. After those first risky mountainside idylls, the relationship between Jack and Ennis supposedly grows and deepens, through long separations and marriage to other people (their wives are played by Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway). But we're never allowed to see how Jack and Ennis navigate those changes. One minute they're kissing hungrily and furtively, reunited after spending many years apart; the next they're cuddling on a motel bed, sharing whispered hopes and fears about their future, or lack thereof. Lee and his actors give us the occasional snapshot of intimacy, but that's not the same as wrapping us in its glow, or making us feel the danger of it in our bones. This is an unconventional love story that's carefully calibrated to offend no one. "Brokeback Mountain" risks so much less than its characters do -- it's a closeted movie.

http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2005/12/09/brokeback/index.html?sid=1419180