Brokeback Mountain

The American western has always celebrated the magnificent scenery of the mid -west and the heroic purity of male friendship united against harsh natural elements and the bad guys. Brokeback Mountain certainly provides the former but no doubt substantial parts of American opinion would still insist that the real bad guys in this story are its two chief protagonists: the gay cowboys, Jack and Ennis, played wonderfully by Jake Gyllenhal and Heath Ledger.

The closeness of western buddies - rounding up cattle or fighting rustlers - has often been presented like that of war comrades and some have discerned a (maybe unconscious) homoerotic quality to such relationships in films like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, to say nothing of amused finger pointing at the Lone Ranger and Tonto. Annie Proulx's thirty-one page story, originally published in the New Yorker, provided the basis of the screen play (by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana) for a film which drew upon this tendency and developed it into a story of passionate yet hidden love in the early sixties.



The two nineteen year olds meet in Signal, Wyoming where they find work herding sheep during a long summer on Brokeback Mountain. The work is slow and boring and, coming from families bereft of care and love, neither are inclined to communicate more than a few grunts apiece. The early part of the film is consequently slow moving but the glacial pace is necessary to catch the gradual genesis of a friendship which, to their possible surprise, begins to express itself physically.

Come the autumn their parting is typically monosyllabic, suggesting they did not think (or had not realized) anything world shaking had taken place. They both go back to marry in their respective farm-based homes, Ennis to his girlfriend Alma; Jack, to fellow Texas rodeo rider, Lurleen.

Maybe the spark of passion has flown away, one begins to think after four years and the arrival of children, but then a card arrives from Jack to Ennis and he lights up. When they meet they embrace passionately - observed by Alma as it happens - and repair to a motel for sex.

They now realize that what began on the windswept mountain is not to be shrugged off, and they begin to meet regularly in a fully fledged affair. Jack, the softer, more needy, more sensual of the two, would like them to live as a couple somewhere; but Ennis, refusing, recalls the awful fate of a local farmer who lived with a partner and who had been beaten to death with a tyre wrench. He suggests they just carry on in this clandestine fashion as the best they can manage or ever hope for.

But neither can achieve 'normality' in their heterosexual relationships. Both strong, in some ways very traditional males, they are now aware of their sexuality and struggle to cope with this knowledge. But this is way before the invention of 'gay' men and the price for both is the lonely, cruel, dangerous lives of homosexuals in redneck homophobic societies. One of the pluses of a film like this is that it helps confront the murderous prejudice of parts of America where such views are still commonplace and unchallenged.

The film is a lyrical, slow-burning tale on the universal theme of forbidden love. And one does not need to be gay to appreciate its timelessness: it is essentially a simple and moving film of a love affair. The acting by the two male leads is luminously understated. The respective women attached to their gay partners - Anne Hathaway and Michelle Williams - are each played with perfect sensitivity and the majestic scenery of Alberta, where the story was filmed, plays a major supporting role. I now see why it won the Oscar.