WORLDVIEW

Milos Stehlik's Commentaries

Brokeback Mountain

	Milos Stehlik

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I am very happy that Ang Lee’s film Brokeback Mountain is ending up on so many best-of-the-year film lists and is headed for multiple awards at next year’s award competitions. That is not to say that Brokeback Mountain actually is the best film of the year.

But if it can break new ground, if it can break out of the ghetto of the gay and lesbian film genre, and more importantly, if it can humanize some bigot who might by chance see it, it will be a true mission accomplished. Besides, Ang Lee is a talented, hard-working and very sweet guy.

He is a strange filmmaker because of his eclectic tastes. I think Ang Lee is fascinated by the idea of movie genres and the possibility that he can master them and then subvert them - do a genre spin, so to speak. Ang Lee’s genre hopping ranges from Jane Austen in his Sense and Sensibility to comic strips with The Hulk to martial arts with Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. Ostensibly, Brokeback Mountain is a Western, but even in the Annie Proulx short story on which it is based, it’s kind of a post-modernist Western. The West in Brokeback Mountain, particularly the landscapes and the cowboy culture serve as a very painterly, emotional canvas against which the real, the subversive genre film plays out. Brokeback Mountain is not so much as Western as it is a very old fashioned romance -- a love story.

Jake Gyllenhall and Heath Ledger, the two cowboys who meet on a sheep grazing gig in the awesomely beautiful mountains, two lost souls, really, facing the loneliness and the silence of their surroundings, find warmth, passion, and love in the midst of a raging snowstorm.

Ang Lee’s intelligence here is that he is smart enough not to take sides. He is non-judgmental – it would be difficult to nail down a point-of-view about either the relationship, or the fact that it becomes adulterous when both Jake and Heath get married and have children, or about the social constraints which keep their passionate affair illicit and under cover. The only point of view here is a tragic one: the romantic idea that this great love can never be, that it has no real possibility to exist, that it is doomed. It is almost Victorian, in a way.

This single-minded focus gives Brokeback Mountain its power to jump the genre by becoming the first major feature with a homosexual love story at its core to become a mainstream picture. Will it play in Peoria? Well, it could. Right-wing groups have already said they don’t plan to picket so as not to give the film more attention. Heath Ledger and Jake Gylenhaal, in a publicity and marketing push worthy of a Spielberg film, are splashed across magazine covers, dubbed the “kissin’ cowboys.”

For me, the unsung hero of Brokeback Mountain is the co-screenwriter, Larry McMurtry. He is positively brilliant in how he nails the dialogue so precisely one can’t imagine characters in contemporary West speaking any other way. The more obvious achievements are those of the two lead actors – Jake Gyllenhaal as Jack Twist and Heath Ledger as Ennis Del Mar. You can truly say that they deliver performances that are fully committed, in which they give it all they’ve got. If the camera sometimes lingers a little too adoringly on their profiles – something that smells of kitsch – well, so be it. True romances are not noted for their rigor. But I think equally terrific are the performances by the two tragic women, sidelined by their husbands’ passion for each other --- Michelle WIlliams as Alma and Anne Hathaway as Lureen

The pain of these women, particularly of Alma, is palpable, raw, with dimensions of tragedy.

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