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Movie Reviews
| Brokeback Mountain. Dir. by Ang Lee. Prod. by Diana Ossana and James Schamus. Paramount Pictures and Focus Features, 2005. 134 mins.
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| North American western historians who are perturbed by mainstream representations of the West in film should be encouraged by Hollywood's efforts in 2005, including not only Brokeback Mountain but also Crash and Transamerica. Only Brokeback Mountain looks like a western; it features white men in cowboy hats on horses. Nothing else about the movie fits the genre. Its genre-busting depiction of same-sex intimacy no doubt strikes most viewers. But film buffs note as well the studied absence of a narrative thread often spun out in classic westerns, antiwesterns, and nihilistic later westerns—the story of tension between "civilization" and "savagery," and of the hero who negotiates it. Western historians, for their part, should be just as heartened by the sheep cast in the movie as by the humans and their relationships. This is because western history as a field has been about as attracted to sheep as it has been to same-sex lovers (not). In their representation of the sheep industry and of sheepherders' possible passions, the cultural producers Annie Proulx, Ang Lee, Larry McMurtry, and Diana Ossana are a step ahead of many historians. |
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Brokeback Mountain provokes such chatter that even those who have not seen it know its plot and not because they have read Proulx's fine story on which it is based. Two gorgeous young men (in the film, not the story—in the story, they are average looking) meet in the summer of 1963 when both agree to watch a rancher's sheep on Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming. They fall in love and lust until an early snowfall sends them and the sheep back down to their old lives. Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger), the strong, silent one who sees no future for his summer passion, marries quickly and fathers two daughters. Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), the voluble dreamer, holds out hope for a life with Ennis and drifts a bit longer, then marries and fathers a son. Jack will not let go of his dream, though, and Ennis, try as he might, cannot let go of his passion. So they steal away together, telling their wives (played by Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway) that they are fishing or hunting, turning Wyoming's high country into the most spacious of no-tell motels. Ennis's wife divorces him, and Jack settles into a distant marriage until violence cuts short his life, leaving Ennis to mourn his losses and, undoubtedly, his choices. |
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When Brokeback Mountain opened, few noted that the story it told had as much to do with rural labor and western class relations as it did with same-sex romance. Ennis is a ranch hand from a star-crossed Wyoming family (he explains that his parents died when they missed the only curve on a high plains road, a line that provokes a chuckle among westerners). He remains a workingman, taking up labor on rural highways, for example, while his wife works at a grocery store; they live above a laundromat. Jack follows the rodeo circuit until marriage brings him upward mobility. His father-in-law sells farm equipment in Texas and employs him as a salesman; his wife also works for the company. But Jack's financial security does not protect him from the horrendous, homophobic beating that kills him. While reviewers have dubbed the film the "gay cowboy movie," few cattle appear on the screen. The animal stars are the sheep, and it is sheepherding that brings Jack and Ennis together. |
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