Movie Review of BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN

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During the 2004-2005 academic year, I wrote my master´s thesis about director Ang Lee´s first three feature-length movies, his "Father Knows Best" thematic trilogy. Therefore, when his latest effort, "Brokeback Mountain", won the top prize at 2005´s Venice Film Festival, I was very excited to see one of my favorite directors gain recognition at an important movie event. I was also excited about the prospect of seeing a great movie in a year filled with dreadful things like "Star Wars III" and the second half of "War of the Worlds".

The reviews, the awards, and the general acclaim have become rather intense during the past few months. Many of the movie´s defenders state that, if you can´t find it in your heart to like the movie, then you must be homophobic. I´m sure that there are anti-homosexuals who DO dis-like the movie because it is sympathetic to the plight of two homosexual men. The thing is, the movie never pushes a "homosexual agenda"--Ang Lee rarely tries to force anything in his movies--so people arguing about the movie´s merits based on its subject matter are stuck spinning their tires in the mud.

Yes, the movie is about two male lovers, but it never argues that people who can´t accept homosexuals are jerks. Rather, Ang Lee decided that homophobes either aren´t going to see his movie or will hate it no matter what he does, so he wisely doesn´t participate in any social arguments. This approach allows viewers to absorb the movie´s rich visuals and patient observations about American life in Wyoming and Texas during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

The movie begins with Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) working for a sheep breeder in Wyoming. During the summer, Ennis and Jack spend long hours making sure that the sheep under their supervision can graze on the mountains without being eaten by coyotes. During one particularly cold night, Ennis and Jack sleep in a tent and end up having sex. Thus begins an odyssey of love that encounters road bumps such as self-doubt, self-loathing, learning self-acceptance, heterosexual marriage, parenthood, divorce, and social expectations/pressures.

Roger Ebert´s take on the central love pairing is spot-on correct. Since the movie doesn´t rant about the need to accept homosexuality as a "normal" thing, we can treat the story as one about two lovers under any condition who can´t be together. This includes lovers separated by families, by revolutions, by social class, etc. However, while this is one of the movie´s strengths, it also reveals its weaknesses. Since we don´t have to discuss homosexuality, we can talk about what works and what doesn´t in the movie.

For me, the performances are the biggest let down of the production. Heath Ledger deserves some of the praise that he´s been getting from other reviewers, but I always sensed that he was struggling to make his character´s internal struggles palpable to audiences. You never want to let viewers see your craft, but Ledger´s at-times weird facial expressions caused me to wonder why Ang Lee didn´t give his lead actor as much instruction as he gave performers in other movies (most notably the acting tips that he gave to Zhang Ziyi for "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and Eric Bana for "Hulk").

Jake Gyllenhaal is mis-cast, and he´s so much of a blank that it´s difficult to believe that a bottled-up personality like Ennis could fall so deeply in love with Jack. For that matter, Gyllenhaal and Ledger never generate much chemistry despite their very physical sex scenes. Michelle Williams does an okay job of playing Ennis Del Mar´s wife, but considering her limited range, I kept thinking about how a talented actress could´ve done so much with the character.

Having lived in Texas for nearly a decade, I´m the first to admit that many Texans are very, very colorful. Yet, this movie´s exaggerations of "Texan-ness" are caricatures rather than realistic representations. Anne Hathaway and Anna Faris are the worst offenders. I´m not sure if Linda Cardellini was playing a Texan or not, but she, too, felt like she belonged in a cartoon rather than a low-key drama.

From a technical standpoint, the editing has some surprisingly awkward moments. It doesn´t help the movie that the best moment involving Michelle Williams, when Alma confronts Ennis about his relationship with Jack, is undercut by the editing favoring showing Ledger rather than Williams. Instead of showing us how much Ennis and Jack have hurt their wives, we mostly see the male lovers huffing and puffing when they don´t get their way. Also, at the end of the movie, there´s a shot of a postcard pinned to a door. When the door is being closed, it momentarily looks as if the camera is rushing into the real scenery depicted by the postcard before there´s an edit to a master shot of the room that allows us to see that the door is being closed. Why didn´t the editors cut the take before the door was moved? (This is Ang Lee´s first movie without editor Tim Squyres, who did great work for Lee--especially the innovative "Hulk". Why didn´t they work together again?)

Ultimately, "Brokeback Mountain" doesn´t accomplish much. Part of the problem lies with the script. Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana adapted E. Annie Proulx´s short story of the same title, and I don´t think that the screenwriters gave the story the dimensions that a 134-minute movie needs. I didn´t mind the pacing so much as I minded the lack of character development. The first half of the movie is its strongest, when we see what it´s like to tend sheep in unforgiving conditions. It´s okay for a movie not to have much happening, but it´s not okay for a movie´s characters to stay flat from beginning to end. Lame character "motivations" are presented so late in the movie that it´s easy to greet them with indifference. The dialogue is "poetic" in a phony way; Ennis is always a master of the obvious, and Jack is always gung-ho about doing their own thing regardless of what everyone else thinks. This keeps the narrative on a superficial level.

The movie has its good points, of course. Rodrigo Prieto´s cinematography is impressive. Even though a lot of the movie takes place in wide open spaces, you still sense the claustrophobia that the characters feel given their forbidden love affair. I also enjoyed the movie´s pacing. The editing and the storytelling won´t give you headaches like so many movies today do, but the movie isn´t so slow as to make you fall asleep. Though I could do without the numerous repetitions of the main music theme (B C D F E C D), the music score has a melancholy twang that fits the mood very well.

Thematically, the movie´s main focus differs from most of Ang Lee´s other movies. This includes even "The Wedding Banquet", which also had a pair of male homosexual lovers. The core of this story is about two lovers who can´t be together. Most of Lee´s other movies are about tensions between fathers and sons. Ennis´s father died when he was a child, and Jack´s father doesn´t appear onscreen until the movie´s nearly finished. Ennis is mostly an absent father to his two daughters, so there isn´t much conflict to be had. Jack´s son Bobby is not a prominent character, and Jack only has two brief scenes with his father-in-law (these two scenes are about emasculation, but the father-son angle is still an appendage rather than a driving concern). I´m sure that E. Annie Proulx´s short story interested Ang Lee a great deal, but he does not display the kind of control over the material that he did with movies that were about his favorite theme. (Even though "Crouching Tiger" does not have a father-son relationship at its core, Lee made that movie partly because one of the few things that he and his father both enjoyed were martial-arts movies. Lee´s father did not like watching his son´s movies about fathers who couldn´t relate well to their sons.)

On DVD Town´s "10" scale, I rate "Brokeback Mountain" a "7". There are times when making a "7" movie is good enough. On the other hand, there are times when great directors make "7" movies--in other words, there are times when great directors make "disappointments".

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