Home > Brokeback Mountain
Cinema-Video Discriminations-Minorit. USA
by David McReynolds
Being retired, I decided I’d catch the 3 p.m. afternoon showing of Brokeback Mountain, thinking I’d have the theatre almost to myself. I was surprised to find it nearly half full. I’d wondered what possible audience (aside from gay men) there could be for a film about two cowboys and their homosexual affair. It would seem there is a wide audience - and the film merits it. Brokeback Mountain is not, in the usual sense, a gay film.Those looking for much "full frontal sexuality" will be disappointed, In these times, when cable brings us nearly 24 hour a day porn, it is more than a half hour into the film before anything at all occurs. The physical encounters are not frequent, and I can expect gay websites will be outraged at what isn’t shown.
The film - directed brilliantly by Ang Lee - is a love story. Unlike most love stories which somewhat deceptively focus on "love", this focuses on the intense sexuality of what is at the heart of love. Yes, the two guys talk, swim, fish, but their love is an intense, unspoken physical attraction. From the moment the film opens, with Heath Ledger leaning against a trailer - a kind of "hiring hall" for the cowboys needed for the summer - Ang Lee conveys the electricity of the situation, made obvious when Jake Gyllenhaal pulls up to the "hiring hall" in his pick up, and looks at the other man. They are cowpokes for the summer, in 1962, long before the word gay was in circulation, years before Stonewall, and more than a thousand miles from San Francisco or New York. We may know what they are getting into - but it is clear they don’t.
There is beauty in the filming, in watching flocks of sheep move like an abstract painting, the hugeness of the landscape, the loneliness of the space. Into this vastness of a Wyoming summer, two young men fall, almost accidentally, into a physical relationship. There is nothing fey about either man. These are not sensitive youths who are victims of High School hostility. Rather, they are two very butch guys, one of whom (Jake Gyllenhaal) is more obviously the "hunter". When the summer ends, they part, suggesting perhaps they will meet the following summer. It is the "ever so slightly more butch" Heath Ledger who, after Gyllenhaal pulls off in his pickup, seeks out a dark corner, breaks down weeping, smashing his fist against a wall.
The film follows the two men over the next twenty years, as each of them marries, becomes a parent, as they meet again during the summers, seizing a few days out of the year for a relationship they know is impossible. When one man suggests they go off somewhere and simply set up a ranch of their own, the other reminds him that "two guys living together - it ain’t possible" and recounts the story of his youth, when a tough old rancher who had tried it was hunted down and murdered, and his own father had taken him to see the corpse.
The relationship destroys one marriage. It haunts both men, who, caught in an affair which is more important to them than anything else, are yet trapped in a world where the relationship itself is impossible.
I left the theatre feeling close to tears. Brokeback Mountain is a film which deserves to be seen on its own merits, not because its subject matter is homosexual. I had wanted to see the film by myself, for it carried me back to an affair of my own, decades ago, with a man who is surely still alive (these days everyone lives into their 70’s), married, with children, and grandchildren. I remember at the time, when all was young and sexual, one of my fantasies was to go deep into the California mountains with him, campfires, hiking and randy sex. That was a very long time ago, in the 1940’s. Back when I, too, had no clear idea what to do, or what was possible.
One thing I thought as I left the movie was that if these two men had been born twenty years later, it is doubtful if they would have been riding on a float in a Gay Pride parade. What they had was rare, not for public display. All of the actors are fine - special credit must go to Anne Hathaway, as the wife who realizes too late that her husband can never be fully hers.