** Fair warning: The following review may contain plot spoilers. **
This film was making waves because of a short but explicit gay love scene and a story that revolved around two cowboys in the early sixties. Yet Brokeback Mountain is simply an ageless, timeless, heart warming and heart breaking love story. It defies gender, ethnicity, and seems so right, even in a time that was supposedly wrong for passion between two men.
A chance meeting between two 19 year old cowboys, (the direct anti thesis of each other) ends in their working together herding sheep on Brokeback Mountain. Ennis Del Mar(Heath Ledger) is quiet, often socially inept, inscrutable, his face and emotions hidden beneath a white hat. Jack Twist(Jake Gyllenhaal) a rodeo cowboy is more open, his long lashed startling blue eyes checking out the obviously ill at east Ennis, as both wait for a Wyoming rancher (Randy Quaid) to show up to give them a job.
A season of sheep herding, leads to a shy letting down of barriers by Ennis as the comfort level between the two men slowly increases. Then a cold night, some whisky and the beginning of a love affair that both try dismissing as a one night stand. Ennis tells Jack brusquely, “You know I ain’t queer.” Jack replies glibly “Me neither” but the relationship deepens and intensifies. At the end of the season both leave knowing that their connection went beyond anything they had ever known or felt for any one else. Jack looks at Ennis wistfully and asks if he would be back for another season-the response is a curt no from Ennis who adds that he is soon getting married. The longing in Jack’s eyes as they part reflects itself in the despair that Ennis feels as he vomits and sobs out his anguish as soon as Jack leaves.
Both get married and meet again four years later.
Life has changed for both. Ennis is struggling to make ends meet raising two daughters. Jack has married into money and is struggling to come to terms with being the kept son in law of a rich man as he continues his life with a flaky wife and a spoilt young son.
Their seemingly mundane life comes to a stand still for a few days after four years when they reunite. A usually reticent Ennis throws caution to the wind as he hungrily kisses and embraces Jack right underneath the window accidentally opened by his wife Alma (Michelle Williams) who becomes a shocked witness to something she is unprepared for. The scene is heart breaking and poignant at the same time. The two go back to recapture the magic of their cocooned existence on Brokeback mountain under the pretext of fishing. They meet each year for 2 decades for a few days to connect intensely and then part while Alma hides her agony in tears, puffs of cigarette smoke and sudden resentful tantrums.
The only other place Ennis feels comfortable in showing his emotions is the tenderness with which he kisses and tends to his two daughters. There is a very telling scene where Ennis and his wife are screaming angrily at each other still clinging to a marriage already in tatters, the two young girls are on swings watching the tirade, as Alma stomps away. Ennis stops, his voice suddenly softened with love and asks the girls if they needed a push, before going back to kick a drum angrily out of the way. Alma finally ends the marriage without confronting Ennis.
Jack seemingly has it all, and yet the emptiness that he feels becomes unbearable with each reunion. A specially telling moment happens when Jack joyously drives all the way from Texas to Wyoming after hearing about Ennis’s divorce and hoping to spend the weekend with him, only to find Ennis has his daughters for the weekend. He drives away tears of frustration and unrequited love streaming down his face. He drowns his sorrow in the first of many one night stands with a male prostitute in Mexico.
A few stolen days of love and enchantment every year for two decades are not enough any more for Jack. He tries to convince Ennis to leave, and live with him. But Ennis refuses and instead shares an incident that has haunted him from the time he was a young boy. Two older men who lived together near his home were found brutally murdered one day. His father takes him and his older brother to look at the corpses to ensure they knew this was wrong. He says to Jack “This thing gets hold of us at the wrong time and wrong place and we’re dead.”
Memories of 20 years flash by before Jack’s sorrow filled eyes as they stand haggling for dates and times when Ennis can see him. An August reunion is pushed to November. Jack walks away.. never to return. Ennis receives a postcard that Jack is dead. Numb with grief, he calls Jack’s home and his wife concocts a story about a burst tire, an accident, as scenes of men violently attacking and killing Jack flash in the background bringing back memories of Matthew Shepherd, the young gay man killed in Wyoming a few years ago. Jack’s wife tells Ennis that Jack wanted his ashes sprinkled on Brokeback Mountain but she wasn’t sure it even existed. If he wants, Ennis could collect them from Jack’s parents and fulfill his last wish.
Jack’s parents, their faces ravaged by grief, share memories of their son with Ennis. Spoken and unspoken words tell him that they know their son had been waiting for him for years. His mother gives Ennis access to Jack’s room. Her pain stricken haunted eyes light up for just a brief moment as she says she has kept the room as it had been since Jack’s childhood.
Stoic and silent, Ennis walks into the dark room, raises the window as if to finally let the light of his presence, and his love through, and breaks down when he finds his blood stained shirt in Jack’s closet. My friend pointed out how that scene was such a telling moment….both men keep each other’s clothes and a postcard of Brokeback mountain in the closet – a closet that they could never emerge from. Ennis takes Jack’s shirt that covers one of his own, with him.
The movie ends, with Ennis standing, in his sparse mobile home, gazing with tear filled eyes at the two shirts, and a postcard of Brokeback mountain, after his daughter leaves telling him to come to her wedding. As she moves to a future filled with love, Ennis is surrounded again by the ghost of a lost love..a love that was within his grasp in those stolen moments on a hauntingly beautiful mountain. If only he could have held on tight.
Heath Ledger and Jack Gyllenhaal especially, have gone beyond excellence in their performances. I hope both get nominations at the Oscars. Ang lee always mesmerizes me with the grace and beauty of his direction, and this film was no different when it came to breathtaking cinematography. He captures the beauty of rural Wyoming with the same finesse with which he narrates the story of the rarest of deep connections and the anguish of hopeless love. Of course my fried said he would be curious to know about the response in Wyoming to this film. So would I. I’d love to see a discussion by the actors, the directors on the Oprah Winfrey show, if it hasn’t happened already.
This is definitely a must see film for 2006.
Memories of the story I had done on South Asian gays some time back came flooding back and with it the realization that though things are better, there are so many challenges that remain.
More than anything else I walked away reminded once again that love and life are transient and can vanish in the blink of an eye, and you must not be afraid to hold on, because ultimately, the worst thing in life is regret.
I end with one of my favorite poems by Robert Frost that seems to resonate so well with this story.
THE ROAD NOT TAKEN
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.