Gay-Cowboy Histrionics
Brokeback Mountain
First thing to know about Brokeback Mountain is that it doesn't remotely take place in the real world. Set in a town called Signal, Wyoming, its story unfolds in the realm of issues-addressing the debate on gay marriage by depicting its denial: a decades-long love story among two Wyoming sheep ranchers (Heath Ledger as camp-tender Ennis Del Mar and Jake Gyllenhaal as herder Jack Twist). Director Ang Lee's hot-topic liberalism thus reaches its low point by making a gratuitous, shameless analogy to the 1998 killing of Matthew Shepard. A modern-day liebestod among gay men should be enough without resorting to guilt tactics. But that intimidation may explain the film's already esteemed, overly congratulatory rep.
Brokeback Mountain works best as an elegy, not a love story. Lee's climax emphasizes the pain of regret due to loss when one of these pardners dies. Better than arguing for gay marriage, Lee makes a relatively sophisticated connection to the AIDS holocaust-a contemporary experience as lingeringly traumatic as 9/11. Neither of these cowboys gets infected; the idea is that their love is pure and untainted like the mountain air. Yet Lee very deliberately evokes Americans' subconscious sense of AIDS mourning. He employs a romanticized hypothesis about the difficulties borne by gay men and keeps it in the nostalgic tense of mush. For that reason, you don't have to believe anything Ledger and Gyllenhaal go through. And you don't, really. From the moment the two meet, looking for employment at a ranch office, the story seems to be taking place in pantomime. (It's a scene of not cruising, which just feels unnaturally inhospitable rather than shy.) Lee creates a didactic haze in which the love that dares not speak its name stoically proclaims its right to be.
Ennis and Jack get it on after too many cold, lonely nights in the valley; they're like prisoners fucking out of boredom rather than succumbing to unmanageable urges. This is probably because Lee is too much the fastidious esthete to demonstrate funky, sweaty or even quixotic desire. Remember the almost chaste gay couple in his debut The Wedding Banquet? Refusing to explicitly mention either Ennis or Jack's hankering, Lee creates a strangely remote, uninflected narrative. Its eroticism is so subtle it's invisible, which prudes might prefer; but it leaves Ledger and Gyllenhaal doing the kind of joshing and dry-humping actors frequently do offscreen, plus lots of lame innuendo. Screenwriter Larry McMurtry preserves the awkward dialogue and exposition from Annie Proulx's original short story. (Only a ludicrous-to-banal writer like Proulx would bother outing a character named Jack Twist.)
As the story spans from 1963 to the present, both Ennis and Jack marry women (Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway), have children and pine for each other-all the time fighting, then hiding, their periodic assignations. (Critic Dennis Delrogh calls this plotline "a gay Same Time Next Year.") There's so much reticence that the story doesn't keep pace with changes in public and private perception of homosexuality. The oddball result is what Variety might term a "soap/oater." Somehow, over the years, neither Ennis nor Jack heard Bobbie Gentry's proto-gay hit song "Ode to Billie Joe" or saw the movie Midnight Cowboy-events that might have given them gay consciousness or put their affair in some workable context that wasn't just imaginary. Until you get to its tear-jerking finale, Brokeback Mountain is bizarrely passionless. Most viewers won't know where that gradual surge of feeling comes from.
Here's why: Although Lee is adapting Proulx's short story (and implicitly claiming its New Yorker magazine pedigree), his film is actually-emotionally-based on the 1962 Hong Kong?operetta movie The Love Eterne, which screened at the Film Society of Lincoln Center's Shaw Brothers retrospective. ("Every time I see this movie I cry. I think that for every movie I make, I always try to duplicate that feeling of purity and innocence that I got when I saw this movie," Lee raved.) It was a tale about socially forbidden love between a girl who dresses as a boy to attend school in 17th-century China and falls in love with the top male student. (Imagine an art-movie precursor to Barbra Streisand's Yentl.) The twist? Both lovers in The Love Eterne were enacted by women, giving the film an abstract, dreamlike contemplation of love, gender and immortality.
Lee attempts to transfer The Love Eterne's very precious, soulful proposition and its gossamer emotional quality to Brokeback Mountan's hardtack American western setting. Ennis and Jack display the angst of mythic paramours but it's merely an intellectualized dumb-show of how two men love each other sexually. If it resembles a chick flick, that's not a boon for gay equality, it only proves Lee's inability to match The Love Eterne's musical subversion. He fakes innocence and purity, a disingenuous political move, as proven by that Matthew Shepard insert and the film's hollow histrionics.
Despite Ledger's sonorous voice and Gyllenhaal's doll eyes, they're Details-mag types, essentially playing abstractions-the bourgeoisification of outlaw behavior. They do not spook audiences the way River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves did when My Own Private Idaho showed young men struggling with each other for affection and control. Even when Jack complains to Ennis about the infrequency of their trysts ("I don't know how to make it on a couple of high-altitude fucks once or twice a year!"), his pique seems stronger than his desire.
Fear of desire constrains Brokeback Mountain. Is it coincidental that Ennis and Jack's first sex is followed by a shot of dead sheep? It seems to judge the men as despoilers of nature. Is it mere ineptitude that Lee's homage to In the Mood for Love is vague and flat? (Jack trawls a Mexican alley full of male prostitutes to the tune of "Quizas, Quizas, Quizas.") It avoids the truth of loveless sensuality that complicates the gay-male libido (like those apologists who ignore Matthew Shepard's rough-trade proclivity). These traces of guilt and prudery unfortunately mark Brokeback Mountain as the work of clueless propagandists.
Recently, a number of extraordinary gay-themed movies have been ignored by the same mainstream press extolling Brokeback Mountain: Jacques Nolot's Porn Theater, Miguel Albaladejo's Bear Cub, Patrice Chereau's Son Frere, Julian Hernandez's A Thousand Clouds of Peace, Lionel Baier's Garcon Stupide, Gael Morel's Three Dancing Slaves, Tim Kirkman's Loggerheads, Neil Jordan's Breakfast on Pluto and Duncan Tucker's Transamerica. It's an honor roll. These gay stories have been among the most innovative and moving films of the era; broadening cinema's spectrum of humanity, enabling viewers to understand and share the complexity of how gay people live-working from the inside out, searching for the love eterne.
Ang Lee works from the outside in, relying on PC polemics. Yes, he touches the well of despond caused by homophobia and the AIDS crisis, thus sentimentalizing gay life as doom and grief. This is how the patronizing mainstream congratulates itself (set to the whining strains of Rufus Wainwright). Since our sexist film culture doesn't acknowledge the sublimity of a film like A Thousand Clouds of Peace, we're restricted to the shamefaced pathos of Brokeback Mountain-and damn that fake-cornpone, syntactically absurd title.