Brokeback Mountain now playing

Stephen Holden, NEW YORK TIMES

The lonesome chill that seeps through Ang Lee's epic western, Brokeback Mountain, is as bone deep as the movie's heartbreaking story of two cowboys who fall in love almost by accident. It is embedded in the craggy landscape where their idyll begins and ends. It creeps into the farthest corners of the wide-open spaces they share with coyotes, bears and herds of sheep and rises like a stifled cry into the big, empty sky that stretches beyond the horizon.

One night, when their campfire dies, and the biting cold drives them to huddle together in a bedroll, a sudden spark between Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) flares into an undying flame.

The same mood of acute desolation permeates the spare, gnarly prose of Annie Proulx's short story, first published in The New Yorker in 1997, adapted by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. Mr. McMurtry knows about loneliness. Its ache suffused his novel and his screenplay for "The Last Picture Show," made into a film 34 years ago by Peter Bogdanovich.

The sexual bouts between these two ranch hands who have never heard the term gay (in 1963, when the story begins, it was still a code word transiting into the mainstream) are described by Ms. Proulx as "quick, rough, laughing and snorting."

That's exactly how Mr. Lee films their first sexual grappling (discreetly) in the shadows of the cramped little tent. The next morning, Ennis mumbles, "I'm no queer." And Jack replies, "Me neither." Still, they do it again, and again, in the daylight as well as at night. Sometimes their pent-up passions explode in ferocious roughhouse that is indistinguishable from fighting.

This moving and majestic film would be a landmark if only because it is the first Hollywood movie to unmask the homoerotic strain in American culture that Leslie Fiedler discerned in his notorious 1948 Partisan Review essay, "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey." Fiedler characterized the bond between Huckleberry Finn and Jim, a runaway slave, as an unconscious romantic attachment shared by two males of different races as they flee the more constraining and civilizing domain of women. He went on to identify that bond as a recurrent theme in American literature.

In popular culture, Fiedler's Freudianism certainly could be applied to the Lone Ranger and Tonto. Minus the ethnic division, it might also be widened to include a long line of westerns and buddy movies, from Red River to Midnight Cowboy to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: the pure male bonding that dare not explore its shadow side.

Ennis and Jack's 20-year romance begins when they are hired in the summer of 1963 by Joe Aguirre (Randy Quaid), a hard-boiled rancher, to work as sheepherders on Brokeback Mountain in the Wyoming high country. (The movie was filmed in Alberta, in the Canadian Rockies.) Subsisting mostly on canned beans and whiskey, the two cowboys develop a boozy friendship by the campfire.

So taciturn and bottled up that he swallows his syllables as he pulls words out of his mouth in gruff, reluctant grunts, Ennis tells Jack of being raised by a brother and sister after his parents died in a car crash; Jack, brought up in the rodeo, is more talkative and recalls his lifelong alienation from his father, a bull rider.

When signs of an early blizzard cut short their summer employment, Ennis and Jack go their separate ways; Ennis's farewell is a simple "See you around." Both, though, are torn up. Ennis marries his girlfriend, Alma (Michelle Williams), and they have two daughters. Jack meets and marries Lureen (Anne Hathaway), a Texan rodeo queen, with whom he has a son, and joins her father's farm-equipment business.

Four years pass before Jack, who is living in Texas, sends a general-delivery postcard to Ennis, who has settled in Wyoming, saying he will be in the area and would like to visit. The instant they set eyes on each other, their suspended passion erupts into a spontaneous clinch. Alma sees it all, and her face, from that moment on, remains frozen in misery. The reunited lovers rush to a motel.

So begins a sporadic and tormented affair in which the two meet once or twice a year for fishing trips on which no fish are caught. Jack urges that they forsake their marriages and set up a ranch together. But Ennis, haunted by a childhood memory of his father taking him to see the mutilated body of a rancher, tortured and beaten to death with a tire iron for living with another man, is immobilized by fear and shame.

Both Mr. Ledger and Mr. Gyllenhaal make this anguished love story physically palpable. Mr. Ledger magically and mysteriously disappears beneath the skin of his lean, sinewy character. It is a great screen performance, as good as the best of Marlon Brando and Sean Penn. The pain and disappointment felt by Jack, who is softer, more self-aware and self-accepting, continually registers in Mr. Gyllenhaal's sad, expectant silver-dollar eyes.

The second half of the movie opens up Ms. Proulx's story to follow both men's slowly crumbling marriages. For years, Alma chokes on her pain until one day, after she and Ennis have divorced, it rises up as if she were strangling on her own bile. As Jack, desperately frustrated, has clandestine encounters with other men, Ms. Hathaway's Lureen slowly calcifies into a clenched robotic shell of her peppery younger self.

Brokeback Mountain is not quite the period piece that some would like to imagine. America's squeaky closet doors may have swung open far enough for a gay rodeo circuit to flourish. But let's not kid ourselves. In large segments of American society, especially in sports and the military, those doors remain sealed. The murder of Matthew Shepard, after all, took place in Brokeback territory. Another recent film, Jarhead (in which Mr. Gyllenhaal plays a marine), suggests how any kind of male behavior perceived as soft and feminine within certain closed male environments triggers abuse and violence and how that repression of sexual energy is directly channeled into warfare.

Yet Brokeback Mountain is ultimately not about sex (there is very little of it in the film) but about love: love stumbled into, love thwarted, love held sorrowfully in the heart.

Or, as Ms. Proulx writes, "What Jack remembered and craved in a way he could neither help nor understand was the time that distant summer on Brokeback when Ennis had come up behind him and pulled him close, the silent embrace satisfying some shared and sexless hunger."

One tender moment's reprieve from loneliness can illuminate a life.

Mick LaSalle,
THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

Brokeback Mountain is already being talked about as the "gay cowboy movie," shorthand that neither does it justice nor gives the right impression. It makes it sound either cavalier or easy to categorize, when the relationship depicted in the movie is a lot more complicated and difficult to pinpoint.

It's about two men who are in love, and it makes no sense. It makes no sense in terms of who they are, where they are, how they live and how they see themselves. It makes no sense in terms of what they do for a living or how they would probably vote in a national election.

It makes no sense, except in one place in the world, the place where it started, on Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming. And though they come down from that mountain and go about their lives, they keep going back to it, over the course of years, because however much the love doesn't make sense, it's real - so real, it makes their lives unreal. There are kids, marriages, jobs, nights of drinking, heterosexual flings, in-laws and holidays to celebrate, and they do everything they're expected to do, but numb. Then every so often, they meet back up on the mountain and get to be themselves for a few stolen days.

The situation carries a lot of emotional power, largely because it's so specific and yet undefined. The two guys - cowboys - are in love with each other, but we don't ever quite know if they're in love with each other because they're gay, or if they're gay because they're in love with each other.

It's possible that if these fellows had never met, one or both would have gone through life straight. That's one way of looking at the movie, though only one. In any case, because their attraction is not defined as some inevitable consequence of sexual orientation but as something that just happens to them, we see them as irreplaceable to each other - like Romeo and Juliet. There's no notion that either could go out tomorrow or 10 years from now and find someone else.

Brokeback Mountain, based on Annie Proulx's 1997 story, is directed by Ang Lee in a  that pays attention to the nuances of expression, to the thoughts and emotions being articulated between the words and in the pauses. This is necessary, because cowboys don't do much talking. Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal play Ennis and Jack, respectively, who meet when they're hired to tend a herd of sheep in Wyoming in 1963. They're both tight-lipped fellows, but Ledger is the more closed off of the two. He adopts a manner of speaking that suggests repression, a pressing down of the vocal cords as though jealous of any word that might escape. It's up to interpretation whether he knows, at first, the thing that he's trying to hide. In any case, nature will out, and it does one night, with a suddenness bordering on violence, when the two men share a tent.

The idea of two Marlboro men having sex in a tent is, in itself, an unexpected twist on a traditional image of American manhood. They cook beans, make coffee, share rodeo stories and do all the things that cowboys usually do. They are Western outdoorsmen in the true American tradition, and they can't be transplanted, which makes their love all the more difficult. You can't be a gay couple in a small Western town in 1963, and you can't be a cowboy in New York or San Francisco.

Both actors do memorable work, but Ledger has the better role, and he makes the strongest choices. He gives Ennis a voice and mannerisms that are utterly idiosyncratic, and then inhabits those choices psychologically, making sense of the locked-down speech, the haunted look and the strong but diffident manner. He completely transforms himself. It's a performance that was thought through in detail and then lived in the moment, and it's one of the most beautiful things in movies this year.

Lee's attention to the unspoken carries over into the domestic scenes, of the men with their respective wives. As with the men, there are things the wives don't dare say out loud, as well, but we can read their thoughts and see the toll the years take. Anne Hathaway, the star of the innocuous Princess Diaries movies, plays Jack's wife, in a committed portrait of a woman getting blonder and blonder, and more bitter and pinched, over the course of some 15 years. It's a brilliant and insightful performance, a time-lapse photography demonstration of what happens to someone who expected to be loved, but wasn't.

Mike Clark, USA TODAY

""

Brokeback Mountain is the ultimate response to those who think the lineup on cable TV's Encore Westerns is a tad too homogenized. It's a heart-wrenching portrayal of unfulfilled Wyoming love, but this time, we don't mean Alan Ladd and Jean Arthur in Shane.

From the ever unpeggable Ang Lee and adapted from an Annie Proulx short story, Mountain is a gay Western with a shot to become much more than a niche movie. Of course, when your directorial résumé includes Sense and Sensibility and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, you obviously know how to work the angles. And for renewed fire in his belly after his Hulk debacle, Lee now turns to more than campfire pork and beans.

Modest in scale but with an epic feel, this 2&frac_one_quarter;-hour portrayal of star-crossed sheep tenders casts Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as two ill-educated drifters you sense at once will not be ending their days collecting corporate pensions. Ledger is halfway between inarticulate and taciturn but perhaps wiser than he initially seems. His more outgoing friend-turned-lover is a Texas rodeo cowboy with slightly more worldly experience.

It's 1963, and the two are half-dumbstruck by their mutual passion. Ledger has severe childhood memories of violence against a gay resident of the beyond-rural burg where he was raised.

After a languorous opening third, the movie soars for the duration as it dramatizes the fallout and periodic reunions from the pair's first and only idyllic summer laboring together. And alone.

The Larry McMurtry-Diana Ossana screenplay, an Oscar-nomination lock, has the authentic feel of McMurtry's Lonesome Dove and The Last Picture Show as well as the cumulative power of his Terms of Endearment. For a movie the actors rightfully dominate, there are artfully developed female characters potently acted by Michelle Williams, Anne Hathaway and Linda Cardellini as wives and lovers either heart-broken over what's happening or cluelessly mystified.

There's nothing fussy or attention-getting about Lee's direction or Rodrigo Prieto's photography, but the selection of shots and the rhythm of their cutting seem unerringly right. And while many of today's movies don't really end - you see a splice, and the end credits roll - the capper here is a kick in the gut. It's an old- virtue for a film that's old- in the best way: unassuming but people-oriented and aiming to endure.

Roger Ebert,
CHICAGO SUN TIMES

""

Ennis tells Jack about something he saw as a boy. "There were two old guys shacked up together. They were the talk of the town, even though they were pretty tough old birds." One day they were found beaten to death. Ennis says: "My dad, he made sure me and my brother saw it. For all I know, he did it."

This childhood memory is always there, the ghost in the room, in Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain. When he was taught by his father to hate homosexuals, Ennis was taught to hate his own feelings. Years after he first makes love with Jack on a Wyoming mountainside, after his marriage has failed, after his world has compressed to a mobile home, the laundromat, the TV, he still feels the same pain: "Why don't you let me be? Its because of you, Jack, that I'm like this -- nothing, and nobody."

But it's not because of Jack. It's because Ennis and Jack love each other and can find no way to deal with that. Brokeback Mountain has been described as "a gay cowboy movie," which is a cruel simplification. It is the story of a time and place where two men are forced to deny the only great passion either one will ever feel. Their tragedy is universal. It could be about two women, or lovers from different religious or ethnic groups -- any "forbidden" love.

The movie wisely never steps back to look at the larger picture, or deliver the "message." It is specifically the story of these men, this love. It stays in closeup. That's how Jack and Ennis see it. "You know I ain't queer," Ennis tells Jack after their first night together. "Me, neither," says Jack.

Their story begins in Wyoming in 1963, when Ennis (Heath Ledger) and Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal) are about 19 years old and get a job tending sheep on a mountainside. Ennis is a boy of so few words he can barely open his mouth to release them; he learned to be guarded and fearful long before he knew what he feared. Jack, who has done some rodeo riding, is a little more outgoing. After some days have passed on the mountain and some whiskey has been drunk, they suddenly and almost violently have sex.

"This is a one-shot thing we got going on here," Ennis says the next day. Jack agrees. But it's not. When the summer is over, they part laconically: "See ya." Their boss (Randy Quaid) tells Jack he doesn't want him back next summer: "You guys sure found a way to make the time pass up there. You weren't getting paid to let the dogs guard the sheep while you stemmed the rose."

Some years pass. Both men get married. Then Jack goes to visit Ennis in Wyoming, and the undiminished urgency of their passion stuns them. Their lives settle down into a routine, punctuated less often than Jack would like by "fishing trips." Ennis' wife, who has seen them kissing, says nothing about it for a long time. But she notices there are never any fish.

The movie is based on a short story by E. Annie Proulx. The screenplay is by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. This summer I read McMurtry's Lonesome Dove trilogy, and as I saw the movie I was reminded of Gus and Woodrow, the two cowboys who spend a lifetime together. They aren't gay; one of them is a womanizer and the other spends his whole life regretting the loss of the one woman he loved. They're straight, but just as crippled by a society that tells them how a man must behave and what he must feel.

Brokeback Mountain could tell its story and not necessarily be a great movie. It could be a melodrama. It could be a "gay cowboy movie." But the filmmakers have focused so intently and with such feeling on Jack and Ennis that the movie is as observant as work by Bergman. Strange but true: The more specific a film is, the more universal, because the more it understands individual characters, the more it applies to everyone. I can imagine someone weeping at this film, identifying with it, because he always wanted to stay in the Marines, or be an artist or a cabinetmaker.

Jack is able to accept a little more willingly that he is inescapably gay. In frustration and need, he goes to Mexico one night and finds a male prostitute. Prostitution is a calling with many hazards, sadness and tragedy, but it accepts human nature. It knows what some people need, and perhaps that is why every society has found a way to accommodate it. Jack thinks he and Ennis might someday buy themselves a ranch and settle down. Ennis who remembers what he saw as a boy: "This thing gets hold of us at the wrong time and wrong place and we're dead." Well, wasn't Matthew Shepard murdered in Wyoming in 1998? And Teena Brandon in Nebraska in 1993? Haven't brothers killed their sisters in the Muslim world to defend "family honor"?

There are gentle and nuanced portraits of Ennis' wife Alma (Michelle Williams) and Jack's wife Lureen (Anne Hathaway), who are important characters, seen as victims, too. Williams has a powerful scene where she finally calls Ennis on his "fishing trips," but she takes a long time to do that, because nothing in her background prepares her for what she has found out about her husband. In their own way, programs like "Jerry Springer" provide a service by focusing on people, however pathetic, who are prepared to defend what they feel. In 1963 there was nothing like that on TV. And in 2005, the situation has not entirely changed. One of the Oscar campaign ads for Brokeback Mountain shows Ledger and Williams together, although the movie's posters are certainly honest.

Ang Lee is a director whose films are set in many nations and many times. What they have in common is an instinctive sympathy for the characters. Born in Taiwan, he makes movies about Americans, British, Chinese, straights, gays; his sci-fi movie "Hulk" was about a misunderstood outsider. Here Lee respects the entire arc of his story, right down to the lonely conclusion.

A closing scene involving a visit by Ennis to Jack's parents is heartbreaking in what is said, and not said, about their world. A look around Jack's childhood bedroom suggests what he overcame to make room for his feelings. What we cannot be sure is this: In the flashback, are we witnessing what really happened to Jack, or how Ennis sees it in his imagination? Ennis, whose father "made sure me and my brother saw it."

Joe Morgenstern,
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

One of the best lines in Ang Lee's beautiful Brokeback Mountain is the last line of the spare Annie Proulx short story that the movie was adapted from: "If you can't fix it you've got to stand it." The it is the dilemma faced by two cowboys, Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist. Ennis and Jack, who are played by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, love each other passionately. Yet they can't live together in the Marlboro Country of the 1960s and 1970s, so they try to hide their love behind shaky façades of heterosexual domesticity. The it is also the love itself, which at first seems baffling to these two manly men, as if it were a thing apart, rather than the force that gives meaning to their lives. Love stories come and go, but this one stays with you -- not because both lovers are men, but because their story is so full of life and longing, and true romance.

The film takes its own good time getting started. Ennis and Jack meet when they're hired to herd sheep on the mountain of the title. Soon they've got all the time in the world to savor the glories of alpine Wyoming -- crystalline skies, wildflowers, snow showers, a slow-moving tide of sheep alongside a fast-running stream. They become part of the landscape, a pair of lonely, overgrown boys with tales of failure to tell and energy to burn. (Ennis, the taciturn one, turns downright garrulous in Jack's presence.) Their first sexual encounter grows out of huddling together in a pup tent to keep warm. It's explosive, animalistic and so unbidden that both men hasten to agree it was a "one-shot thing." Yet their bond will endure for a decade, which the film spans with bold leaps that may initially seem like disjunctures. "Brokeback Mountain" aspires to an epic sweep and achieves it, though with singular intimacy and grace.

Movies made from short stories often seem thin; it's usually sprawling novels that provide rich detail and texture. This one is an exception, thanks to the superb adaptation by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, but Ang Lee's film is exceptional in other ways. The Taiwan-born director works like an American master; every nuance feels right, every scene has its rewards and surprises. As for the performances, they range from superb to superlative. It's no news that Jake Gyllenhaal is a fine actor, and his Jack is a mercurial mix of plain, poetic and practical. But the triumph is that of Heath Ledger, a young Australian who has been known until now as a hunky heartthrob. He's certainly handsome enough here, but in a touchingly bleak, self-contained way. He doesn't portray his powerful, sometimes rageful cowboy so much as release him -- slowly, quietly, tactfully, economically, even reluctantly, or so it would seem, until he has outed Ennis's lyrical soul.

Is America ready for Marlboro men who love men? That remains to be seen, but Brokeback Mountain ought to be seen for the stirring entertainment that it is. Anne Hathaway and Michelle Williams are eloquent as, respectively, Jack's and Ennis's uncomprehending wives. Rodrigo Prieto's camera feasts on the lovely simplicity of Judy Becker's production design, while letting the scenery sing for itself. Gustavo Santaolalla's score reflects the film as a whole -- it's simultaneously spare and deeply affecting.

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