Overall Rating
  Awesome: 62.01%
Worth A Look: 13.1%
Average: 13.1%
Pretty Bad: 5.24%
Total Crap: 6.55%
17 reviews, 127 user ratings
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| Brokeback Mountain |
by Tom Ciorciari
"Young cowboys in love (with one another)."
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In 1963 two young cowboys spend a season on brokeback Mountain, Wyoming, tending sheep and, ultimately, falling in love. For the next fifteen or so years they must learn to incorporate this forbidden relationship into their other, “closeted” lives – maneuvering around wives, family and career. Given the considerable talents involved, one would have expected a film that wasn’t quite so... conventional.Hewing closely to Annie Proulx’s brief (58 pages) novella, screenwriters Larry McMurtry (The Last Picture Show, Lonesome Dove) and Diana Ossana leave a lot of breathing room to be filled. In the first section of the film, which details how cowboys-for-hire Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) are thrown together by fate, in the unlikely personage of rancher Joe Aguirre (Randy Quaid), who sends them up to Brokeback with a thousand head of sheep to herd and a lot of downtime for male bonding, director Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; The Hulk) lets his camera sweep languidly across fields and mountainsides, creating a palpable sense of wide open spaces and beatific quietude, while evoking (almost to the point of blatant imitation) Terrence Malick’s (Days Of Heaven, Thin Red LIne) tableaux style. The boys go about their chores amiably enough and one cold night share a tent with unexpected results. Unexpected due, in no small part, to the complete lack of legitimate dramatic build-up to this moment. There is not one look, be it furtive or lingering, between Ennis and Jack prior to this moment that would indicate any simmering sexual attraction between these men. If, for all the filmmaker’s protests to the contrary, this film were not known as the “gay cowboy movie”, this development (and the only dramatic tension herein is our foreknowledge of what’s coming) would seem downright gratuitous. A for the scene itself, the actors attack one another with such vigor it would appear they’ve confused passion with aggression. (Similarly, in 2004’s Kinsey Liam Neeson and Peter Sarsgaard engage in a kiss that looks as if it might have left bruises; perhaps these hetero actors are fearful of appearing too comfortable in these scenes.)
Yet, despite the seeming reticence on the actors part to fully commit to the required physicality, this is the strongest part of the film. The confusion and unease the two display in the aftermath of their first evening together (“I ain’t queer,” Ennis declares) is perfectly nuanced in both the tightness of Ledger’s jaw and the question in Gyllenhaal’s blue puppy-dog eyes.
Time passes and the boy’s relationship continues to grow closer, as played out in vignettes of the homoerotic horseplay that is practically de rigueur for adolescent males. At the end of the season however they part ways: ennis to his mousy fiancee, Alma (Michelle Williams), and jack to the rodeo circuit. Ennis and Alma have a daughter, the awkwardly named Alma, Jr. (I kid you not), but never move beyond their dumpy apartment over the laundry. The following season Jack reapplies for the job up on Brokeback, but Aguirre won’t have any of it (“You boys sure found a way to make the time pass up there”). It will be years before he and Ennis see one another again, although when Jack finally does drop in on the Del Mars the two reconnect immediately, their pent-up passion pouring forth in a hurried, lustful kiss that Alma, unbeknownst to Ennis, witnesses. The two ol’ pals head off to Brokeback for “some fishin’” – the macho fishing and hunting trips subterfuge for their biannual liaisons.
At this point, however, the film falls into a rut that it is never fully able to extricate itself from. Playing like a stag version of “Same Time, Next Year”, we keep hopping from one rendezvous to the next, with brief side trips into their personal lives (Jack marries the, initially fiery, daughter of a well-to-do farm equipment salesman [Anne Hathaway]; Ennis and Alma have another child and move from over the laundry to a ground level hovel) and are treated to the sight of Ledger and, especially, Gyllenhaal sporting a variety of bad fake sideburns and mustaches to hammer this passage of time home And as Hathaway’s hair color lightens noticeably from scene to scene (as she becomes colder?), ultimately to an almost Dolly Parton platinum, the film veers perilously close to camp.
The problem with this second half of the movie is that not a whole lot seems to really happen. And even when things do, they feel strangely disconnected and incomplete, as if we’re watching a series of thematically linked scenes rather than a whole. Kind of, sort of just like STNY. With gay cowboys.
As Ennis, Heath Ledger does bring a smoldering tension to the screen, particularly in the scenes depicting the loneliness of his domesticity, although his guttural, pinched delivery had me thinking throughout of Billy Bob Thornton’s Carl Childers in Slingblade. As Jack, Gyllenhaal radiates an endearing, wide-eyed boyishness that offsets Ledger’s sullen Ennis well and should forever do away with the Tobey Maguire comparisons. Arguably the initiator of their relationship, we later see Jack eagerly engage Lureen sexually, with no explanation as to whether he is bisexual, so in need of physical intimacy that anyone, regardless of gender, will do, or merely very adept at faking it. Jack is the one willing to have a life with Ennis on their own ranch, an offer which the ever wary Ennis refuses time and again, citing a similar arrangement between two men when he was a boy that ended in homophobic violence. And though we are given some opportunity to know and understand Alma, Lureen, beyond her introductory scenes, is little more than a series of increasingly cold and platinum-tressed blips. When Ennis takes up with a hot-to-trot waitress (a wasted Linda Cardellini) in a pointless third act contrivance we can’t help but wonder, since his marriage was so loveless and without affection, what the hell he’s thinking. Unfortunately, at the end of the day, it really is that kind of movie.
None of this, however, is particularly new ground for director Lee. Unrequited love and words left unspoken were major motifs in both Crouching Tiger... (2000) and The Ice Storm (1997), whereas the western milieu was visited in Lee’s 1999 Civil War drama, Ride With The Devil. Perhaps hoping to return to the more poetic style of his earlier films in the wake of the lambasted Hulk, Lee seems to be trying too hard to seduce with his visuals, sacrificing, alternately, story and characterization in the process. Why, for instance, when Alma finally confronts Ennis on the “fishing trips”, well after she and Ennis have divorced, does she never mention the fact that she actually saw Ennis and Jack kiss! If it were something that she was just going to live with in silent subservience, that would be one thing, but to have her explain how she deduced, via amateur sleuthing (“That fishin’ line never touched the water!” Hoo boy!) that there was something really fishy going on during those weekends, when we know that she saw them! is either sloppy, or, even worse, lazy filmmaking. Period.Plot holes aside, BROKEBACK, is a reasonably well made and sincere piece of adult (as in grown-up) entertainment. But once all the hoo-hah over its alleged groundbreaking subject matter (is it that their gay, or that they’re gay COWBOYS?) blows over, it will more than likely take its rightful place as the somewhat underdone curio it truly is. Yee ha, indeed.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=12764&reviewer=384
originally posted: 04/02/06 09:34:01
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OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2005 Toronto Film Festival For more in the 2005 Toronto Film Festival series, click here.
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USA
09-Dec-2005 (R)
DVD: 23-Jan-2007
UK
N/A
Australia
26-Jan-2006
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