Brokeback Mountain

I admit it: at times I was uncomfortable watching Brokeback Mountain. The film, spanning twenty years, tells the story of forbidden love between two cowboys, Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Ennis (Heath Ledger) out on the Wyoming cattle country in the shadow of Brokeback Mountain.

It wasn’t the scenes of two men kissing that made me squirm, nor even the brief but unmistakable bit of high plains sodomy. No, the discomfort I felt was at seeing the material for an interesting Annie Proulx short story stretched and pulled far beyond its literary limits into a full-length feature film. Brokeback Mountain might have worked well as a forty-minute character study in a student film, but when adapted by mopey cowboy sapmeister Larry McMurtry, the result is both overwrought and occasionally boring.

Amid Brokeback Mountain’s “controversy” and publicity about a sympathetic gay love story, the merits of the film seem to have been glossed over. It’s hard to account for the film’s popularity (or eight Academy Award nominations) other than that the hype and politics have clouded audiences’ cinematic sensibilities.

Jake Gyllenhaal is good as Jack, but Heath Ledger is so tightly wound and marble-mouthed as Ennis that he remains inscrutable. I realize that the character is supposed to be repressed and conflicted, but as portrayed by Ledger it’s unclear if he’s surly, depressed, or just heavily medicated. This leads to a second problem in the film, which is that because Ennis is so reserved it’s hard to see what Jack sees in him at all. Despite this mystery, the pair meet up every summer for years, deceiving their wives and the rest of the world so that their unspoken love can flourish.

A love story like Brokeback Mountain stands or falls on the strength of the script, the actors’ chemistry, and how believable the romance is. On all three counts (unlike, for example, Remains of the Day, Girl with a Pearl Earring, and Moulin Rouge), Brokeback Mountain fails. I don’t care whether the protagonists are gay or straight, I didn’t buy the love story and wasn’t terribly interested in McMurtry’s murky and thinly-written characters. (I defy anyone to list more than three distinguishing characteristics of Ennis Del Mar. I recognize that the list of Oscars included Best Screenplay; we’ll see if it wins.)

Ang Lee (The Ice Storm, but also Hulk) has a good director’s eye, though it’s hard to really screw up such beautiful scenery. Brokeback Mountain isn’t a bad film; it just falls far short of the hype and praise it’s been getting. It’s great that gay characters are finally being depicted in a mainstream love story; too bad that story isn’t also a great film.