Ang Lee's "Brokeback Mountain" is my favourite film. And I find this fact quite annoying. It's very cliche for a gay man, isn't it? Plus it's huge box office success is a sore on my cultural snobbery, which usually revels in enjoying niche and/or obscure pieces only.
Lee's film is one of those rare cases where a work of art is both a masterpiece, and a commercial success.
Here is a review that I wrote a long time ago (when the film was originally released I think), but haven't published it anywere until now.
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Brokeback Mountain by Ang Lee
Ang Lee’s “Brokeback Mountain” has been surrounded by one of the biggest media hypes in recent years, crowned by Sight&Sound, one of the most respectable film magazines in the world, naming it the best movie of 2005. As a result most of the general public already knows it as the “gay cowboy drama/love story.” The movie, however, goes far beyond such generalisations and refuses to adhere to the confinements of a particular genre. No matter how much you hear or read about it beforehand, it is bound to confound your expectations.
“Brokeback Mountain” tells a story of an affair of Jack and Ennis, two white trash cowboys, who meet while working together on a ranch, during the summer of 1963. The option of living happily everafter is, unsurprisingly, not open to them because of the society’s demands for a heterosexual, married lifestyle and their own internalised homophobia.
It would have been very easy for Lee to employ a typical drama template, keep building the tension until the culmination point, where all the emotional members of the audience start to cry, and then finish the film off with an even bigger bang at the end. Fortunately, he refuses to take any shortcuts or use any simplifications and as a result manages to deliver a rich and complex piece of work.
The premise on which the entire movie is built, is the difficulty or even impossibility of communication between the characters. The macho-masculinity doesn’t allow the men to express their emotions. Anger and violence are the only language known to them. What they feel and what they are is unspeakable. The only time in the entire movie, when the word relating to homosexuality is uttered is when, after their relationship has already been consumed, Ennis says “I’m not queer, you know.” During another conversation, he asks Jack whether he sometimes feels like people are staring at him, because they “know”. While you get the impression that everybody “knows” at one stage or another, they find it almost impossible to confront the issue.
Such subtle interplay between the characters is extremely difficult to do well but Lee succeeds on every front. Every scene seems to have been meticulously planned down to simple gestures, and the acting is impeccable. Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal manage to create entrancing chemistry between them and a special connection, in spite of using very little dialogue.
While gay writers and filmmakers are often accused of creating “unconvincing women”, straight Lee manages to create rich, multi-faceted female characters, who instead of being the suffocating matrons, seem more like the victims of their husbands misguided life choices.
With “Brokeback Mountain” Lee succeeds remarkably in creating a movie, in which it is difficult to find any faults. It both de- and re-constructs our idea of a “love story”, creating a film which is bursting with emotions, yet it restrains from employing any tired clichés or valentine cards imagery. Opening with beautiful shots of wilderness, it proceeds to offer probing psychological insight into its many characters, while it explores the limits of masculinity, the repression of (homo)sexual desire and the refusal of the society to confront, let alone accept, “the other”.
