Interesting take on what I see is THE film for 2005. I saw it again yesterday and continue to love the story of Ennis and Jack. I'm with Lee. It's not a gay cowboy movie. It is a love story in the most primal sense. Ledger deserves the Best Actor Oscar hands down while Gyllenhaal has earned the supporting actor nod.

Thanks for the comment. I know a lot of people have been really moved by it; I'd like to talk to them in 20 years and see if they still think it's a great movie. Sometimes the impact of a movie has more to do with the culture at the time of its release than with its artistic merit. Who knows--maybe I'll like it more. But I avoid thinking of the quality of movies in terms of the Academy Awards. Get a book about the Oscars and watch the movies of the nominated performers. Even if there are people out there who think that Luise Rainer was great in The Great Ziegfeld, or Bing Crosby in Going My Way, or Loretta Young in The Farmer's Daughter, or Shirley Jones in Elmer Gantry, or Shelley Winters in A Patch of Blue, or George Burns in The Sunshine Boys (and these are all winners; some of the nominees defy belief), in the long run the list doesn't correlate with anybody's idea of great acting.

"If Ledger had been allowed to play Ennis as a man responsible for his evasiveness and rage, for the brutality that comes from not thinking about your feelings and enforcing that clamp-down on the people around you--while still sneaking off to get what you want but can't admit to--the movie's vision would be much more penetrating than mere sympathy permits, and comparisons to Marlon Brando might have been justified."

I don't agree with much of your take on this movie. Especially concerning the quote above: I think you are looking for a behavior out of Ennis that just would not fit his background nor the information given in the movie. You seem to want him to have processed a lot of what was going on in sort of a completely mature, adult manner with a rather intellectual spin. But the movie makes it clear that in a lot of ways Ennis is like a kid emotionally - he has never had the background of support and love from his family which would have helped him be more in touch with himself, plus, it makes it clear that he is a very inward person, uneducated, not very talkative, and so someone not as likely to offer forth deep personal observations and critiques of himself. Instead, we see that it is not until the very end that Ennis seems to have really turned a corner in terms of his empathy for Jack, his understanding, his maturity (for the first time he does not react with anger and violence when Jack's father mentions Randall). It is this new level of Ennis' personality at the end which saves the film from just being a "Backstreet" kind of show.

Thanks for your comment. I think my comparisons of the story and the movie, however, make it clear I don't want Ennis to be different from what he is. What I want is less of the sympathy that you seem to respond to--"he has never had the background of support and love from his family which would have helped him be more in touch with himself"--and more of Proulx's objectivity. Yes, he's like a kid emotionally, but he's not a kid, he's an adult and adults are responsible for their behavior whatever the cause. Proulx doesn't go soft on this, the movie does. If you've ever been around childish adult men who react violently to emotional troubles, you might agree that in such real-life situations sympathy hops right in the back seat behind other responses. I don't want Ennis to be different, I want the moviemakers to present him differently.

I haven't seen the movie, I live in a small town and it's not playing here yet. Besides, we don't go to movies anyway, we just wait for DVD. Movies are overpriced, people are rude and the seats are worse than airplane seats.

All that aside, I grew up in Oklahoma in the 70's and 80's and met my partner there. We are transplanted cowboys. Like I said, I haven't seen the movie, but I read Annie's story and I can completely relate. Most all the gay people I grew up with, married and had children with women. They just ended up cheating on their wives, society didn't give us the option to be true to ourselves. That option led to violence. I'm actually afraid I'll lose it when I see the movie, I know a few guys who met violent ends because their secret was discovered and I've been on the wrong end of a baseball bat myself, although a long time ago.

We've come a long way since then and I'm glad that our story is finally being told.

Steve, man, how are you? Long time.

How's your daughter? Well we hope.

I'm 8 weeks from seeing the birth of my son, so I'm starting to be gaggingly aware of other people's kids...

Ah fuck, shoot me already...

Hi Bennett, we're doing great. Congrats and be ready to have your world turned upside down in all the best ways possible. Even what you thought would be the bad moments are just great when they are yours to deal with. You'll know what I mean.

"Yes, he's like a kid emotionally, but he's not a kid, he's an adult and adults are responsible for their behavior whatever the cause. Proulx doesn't go soft on this, the movie does."

That quote right there just cracks me up, because it seems like you are trying to impart some sort of morality while watching a movie about someone like Ennis. Face it, most films are interesting or memorable because they are about someone who is flawed in some way, who does not go about things in a completely mature, non-emotional, level-headed way. Sometimes a film is devoted to seeing that person make a journey of sorts (such as Ennis does) from what they once were to something better) but sometimes it is about how they never do make that change.

I also don't think that the audience was completely sentimental towards Ennis and his behavior. The audience sees Ennis as a flawed person, especially in those first years in his marriage, but you also feel renewed kinship with him after he gets divorced, for instance, when he does try to put his best face on and show up at Thanksgiving and be friendly and gracious in the name of family harmony. Most of us have been there or new people who were unhappy at one point but get to a have a series of second chances to be more comfortable in their skin and make amends. The reason that despite some of his outbursts and his infidelity, the audience still feels empathetic with Ennis is because Ang does a wonderful job of showing the audience just how life-changing that summer on the mountain was for Ennis, in a way that he almost cannot describe but we see by his actions and reactions to Jack up on Brokeback, that we can understand Ennis' motivations and quandaries once he is thrust back into the "normal" world that he grew up in. I don't see that as being touchy-feely, but empathetic in a very real sense.

We also see Ennis grow in maturity by the end of the film in his relationship with his daughter, and finally, in his admission and comprehension of his love for Jack after Jack's death. So Ennis does make an emotional journey, but I completely disagree that the movie glamorizes or soft-pedals it for the audience.

Most all the gay people I grew up with, married and had children with women. They just ended up cheating on their wives, society didn't give us the option to be true to ourselves.

"Ang does a wonderful job of showing the audience just how life-changing that summer on the mountain was for Ennis, in a way that he almost cannot describe but we see by his actions and reactions to Jack up on Brokeback"

Are you thinking of when Ennis fucks Jack using only a little spit for lube, or when he gives him a black eye, or when he has the dry heaves after they separate? Indeed I think you sentimentalize the story: "make a journey," "feel renewed kinship with him," "grow in maturity," "emotional journey."

I'm not trying to impart morality; I brought it up only b/c the moviemakers raise the issue and ignore it where Proulx, with her non-judgmentalism, had not brought it up at all. I simply prefer Proulx's approach: it's bracing, truth-telling.

In any society, people have a choice of conforming to whatever the dominant norms and practices or following their own path.

While that sounds good at face value, it doesn't play out that way in the real world, not back then. Granted, the 70's and 80's were better than the 40's and 50's, but you were not free to follow your own path. If you did, and if your path wasn't accepted by society, your home was burned, you were assaulted, you were often targeted for murder, you were branded a criminal because of sodomy laws and so by default you lost any court case you were involved in, whether it had to do with family, property or business. I know this for a fact because I lived through it.

I had no less than 6 friends while I was growing up commit suicide because the societal condemnation was too much for them. I knew of dozens of gay people who suffered depression and/or became alcoholics and consequently had their lives destroyed all because of religious oppression. I wish the world were as peachy as you portray it, but that was simply not the case.

It's interesting to note which parts of the movie straight guys focus on. I think the meaning is ultimately still lost on many.

Hey Steve,

Thanks for your interesting comments. Annie Proulx has reported getting a number of letters like yours. And I, too, am glad that she told this story; she's the one who deserves the credit.

As for the question of personal responsibility for lying and cheating: my point is that while it's undeniable that it was, and in many places still is, socially unacceptable, and even dangerous, to be openly homosexual, gay men nonetheless have to live with the consequences of the secretive and dishonest behavior they engage in as a result. That may sound unfair, but I'm not judging, I'm simply stating what has been my experience and what I've witnessed. Just b/c the world won't let you be openly gay doesn't mean that dishonesty doesn't have the same effect on your character that it has on straight people's characters when they lie to and cheat on their partners.

Oh, and who are you calling "straight"? I actually don't understand what you're referring to with that last comment.

See, I think that Annie Proulx is the one who took a little easier way out in certain ways. In the book, Alma is portrayed as not really being that broken up when she leaves Ennis for the grocer, but then later, she seems to have all this pent up rage. Sort of a shift in her personality. Also, in the book, Ennis is much more talkative, especially about his infatuation with Jack, yet he then goes on to be a big drag on their relationship, again a shift in his character which does not completely ring true. I think the film actually put together a much more realistic portrait of Ennis and just why he could not move forward.

And no I am not being overly sentimental. You list off a few rougher events that happen on the mountain, but you conveniently ignore the obvious flowering of Ennis' personality seen for instance in the second tent scene, in the horsing around scene where Aguirre sees them, in their chats and jokes prior to getting together, etc. The thing is, Ennis does not talk a lot, but surprisingly Ang is able to convey it in other ways. You just seem to want Ennis to be as talky as you are (hee hee)...

Alan, I agree with you about personal responsibility. When I was closeted, it was for fear of my life, my career and my mental health.

When I came out of the closet, I lost more than a few friends because of the 'dishonesty'. That is my karma and what I deserved, although no one but another gay person could possibly related to the need for a closet. It is a catch-22 in my opinion.

Even so, those friends I did lose to the dishonesty, I would have lost anyway if I was honest from the beginning, because while I was closeted around these people, they certainly didn't hide their hate towards my community (and therefore create a need for the closet).

That is the way it works.

Evidently there are no closets on the mountain

LOL! Aaman.

I was moved by the story, i however don't go bragging about it to my friends (for obvious reasons).

Exactly why i was moved isn't clear....
I'm definitely going for the dvd when its out.

Hey Aaman,

That is an interesting idea--on the one hand the sentimental notion that the guys can really be who they are out in nature, and on the other the fact that their boss sees them fooling around through a pair of binoculars so even nature is somehow socially structured. Don't think the movie makes too much of it, though.

Congratulations on Desicritics.org, too!

Thanks Alan - this is probably one reason why the Westerns were so homoerotic in many instances.

Incidentally, we would be honored if you'd like to write posts, possibly on international film, for desicritics.

We launch with interviews with at least two actors, one of whom is a noted art house-style actor named K K Menon

In my opinion, the battle for this year's Best Actor Oscar is between Ledger and Phillip Seymour Hoffman for his performance in CAPOTE.

I don't think anyone will argue with you, but see Comment #2 above on the question of whether the Oscars meaningfully gauge quality.

Yours is probably the most informed criticism of BM I've read.

I personally thought the film started out naturalistically then slid off to melodrama hogwash (that it couldn't even sustain given the original source's austerity). I left the movie feeling dissatisfied and at odd at what I was seeing. Your dissection illuminated and gave reason to my feeling very well. A great thorough job.

As for issues on personal responsibility... if I may illuminate your point. While it's a dead-end for Ennis and Jack (and many people like themselves) with regards to their desire - circumstances dictated their inevitable dishonesty, what makes them less connectable to a film viewer is their non-dealing with their dishonesty. Perhaps if we see them *feel* bad about their cheating/lying, and try to make it up in other ways, and even if they fail at that, we might *connect* with them more, as opposed to resorting to pitying them.

As presented, both generally treat their domestic life hostilely and their wives come off as nuisance.

Thanks, Alan, for the comment. I think the scriptwriters added Ennis's post-Alma girlfriend to emphasize the detrimental effects of his dishonesty. But the scene in the diner where she stands there crying and he says nothing was arguably the worst addition to the story. It just widened the vale of tears they were all caught in, as if feeling sorry for people were the most complex experience art can offer.

Right, Alan! Maybe it's just me, but I cringe whenever a movie's aim is to make me feel sorry for the characters. Being opposite is also cringing, like being condemning, which Ang Lee was in "The Ice Storm". It's condescending art. The artist doesn't attempt to dig deep and connect, but stay an outsider and judge, either sentimentally or critically.

Annie Proulx said that a story (presented in a way like in her writing) is not complete until the reader finished reading it (and have his/her take on it). I think Ang Lee et al. completes the story their way, which is an attitude of pity and sentimentalism. He should either stay terse like Proulx and let the audience complete the story, but since this is a Hollywood movie, they have to do the work for the audience. Even so, wish they would complete it from much more interesting angle.

Anyone see the VH1 special on the movie some time last week? Ledger was wearing dark sunglasses and was looking down during the whole thing.

I should mention that this was an indoor interview.

Thanks, Aaman, for the invite. E-mail me so we can discuss it further.

excellent review!!

As a straight lady, I agreed with everything you said about personal responsibility. Even if I wanted to root for this romance (and I would, had these men remained single or just with each other), the bitter taste of their irresponsible actions leave me feeling as empty as though I were watching a movie about a STRAIGHT extra-marital affair. This movie feels "icky"- not because of the gay theme, of course. Because of the fact that these mens' action make them non-sympathetic in my eyes.

It was hard to be gay back then, but is the ONLY course available to a gay man to decieve a woman and pump out a few kids, all while being disengaged, treating your family like a nuisance (at best) and like dirt (at worst)? What about living as a confirmed bachelor? There have always been men who have not married. The bald truth is, like any adulterer, these men want the comforts of wives and family but also the excitement of their lovers, and are too cowardly and selfish to leave such security behind. I would say this about ANYone, man or woman, gay or straight, that saw lovers on the side and hurt their families.

I am waiting for the true gay love story. A story where two lovers discover their passion, unmarred by angst, lies and general bad feelings. The uplifting, feel-good life-confirming gay love. You know, like the millions of movies about straight couples out there??

Hey Jennifer,

Thank you for the praise and the comment. As for a true gay love story--I like Brian Sloan's 1998 indie romantic comedy I Think I Do a lot. (I wrote about it here.) At the same time, I don't mind showing protagonists who engage in objectionable behavior, as long as the movie doesn't sentimentalize them. I'm all for eyes-wide-open naturalism. There's no denying that Ennis and Jack couldn't have easily lived openly together back then, if at all. But tragedy would be possible only if they were seen to be responsible for their actions--double binds are essential to tragedy.

Thanks again for writing.

This is a response to Comment #15 from Jennifer Adam: The key difference between the story and movie is that whereas Proulx treats Ennis and Jack objectively, as other people out there doing what they do, the movie presents them for us to identify with. This softens the treatment because we're urged not only to understand them from the inside, but to make excuses for them as well, the way we all have the (bad) habit of making excuses for ourselves. The movie's idea of showing the consequences of Ennis's bad behavior is to show how badly he treats his girlfriend and then to have her cry so we feel sorry for her as well. I've said it before on this page, but there's more to narrative than feeling sorry for people!

hi Alan,
thanks! I love your writing style. It's at once lucid and all willy-nilly, which is exactly how my own brain operates.

I do want to clarify that I do agree with you when you say you don't mind movies that take a hard stance and show uneasy material. Me either. Movies don't have to be squeaky clean. If the movie had retained Proulx's unabashed objectivity, in "Yep, that's what happened", then the movie might have felt less "icky". But Ang I think attempted to go for a Sacred Love For All the Ages These Guys are SAINTS motif.

Even though the two movies are nothing alike, I have to compare it to Jack and Rose on Titanic (and hey, one even dies here too). Cameron presented it as though we should be awe-struck at the DEEP love these two share. He presented it as something so sacred as to be unquestioned (their romance was less "icky" because the movie made her fiancee into a caricature of prick-ness who you wouldn't possibly root for). But really, take away the Titanic, the tragic disaster and the period costumes and it's a really silly love story.

Another small complaint about BBM is that not ONE straight man was at all redeemable in the film. As though ALL straight men hate gays and are bigots, and hey, they might even kill you. It was the same "caricature of prick-ness" they used to color Rose's fiancee. It's a tactic to emotionally manipulate. It forces you to root for the characters the movie WANTS you to. At least they were kinder in their portrayal of the wives....

oh BTW thanks for the film recommendation! I'll check it out.

Thanks, Jennifer, especially for "lucid." As for "all willy nilly," the term I use is "impressionistic" but I know what you mean. (As willy nilly as it may seem in print it's been subjected to a lot of discipline!) What you say about Titanic makes sense; at least Brokeback Mountain starts from Annie Proulx. The thing that killed me about Titanic is that they had a thousand odd people on board and absolutely no interest in anyone but Jack and Rose. The disproportion was crushing. As for the treatment of the wives in Brokeback Mountain, the actresses, and the audience, might have had more fun if their characters had been bitches. If you're gonna make a soap opera, why hold back? Thanks again.

Wait a minute. Wait a minute.
You make this comment: (This is hardest on Michelle Williams as Ennis's wife Alma. Proulx didn't seek to make Alma an independently interesting figure. She's just the dead end Ennis goes down because he believes he has to, which doesn't give an actress much to work with.)
Alma is no dead end. She is Ennis's wife with whom he had two children and as such created a family that he lived with for many years. You also say he does this because he believes he has to. I'll call it the Brokeback Disease, which is very common. How many gay men marry a woman and have a family because they feel they have to? They feel they have to, to make their sacrifice upon the alter of normalcy. They have to live a straight life and be closeted to gain the community's respect, to gain stability in their life to have a family, to keep a job, to achieve the things in life that are denied to gay men all over this country, in every community. This is also done to escape things that are always part of a gay man's life: living under the shadow of the tire iron as you say in your review, living under the tire iron of AIDS, living under housing and job discrimination and more.

I also want to understand the Brokeback Disease better. In your review and in several responses to it from other writers the word morality was mentioned. A gay man marrying is not the same thing as a straight man marrying and having adulterous affairs. If a gay married man would have an affair with another woman it would be the same. But if a gay man has an affair with another man, its different. Its different because the gay man makes a tragic decision to get married and to deny his being, his nature. He makes this choice probably for many of the reasons I mentioned in the preceding paragraph. This is a choice probably made with great fear and trembling which lasts through out his life. Can he live up to his choice? Can it ever be successful? It probably will not be totally successful, but it can be more or less. And what a burden it is. It must be carried his whole life. There is also the issue of how many gay men make this decision to marry. Hundreds of thousand? Millions? How many are successful? How many wives never will know? How many find out like Alma and suffer until the end or until divorce? How many love their gay husbands and would never divorce them because they are good fathers and just a good person? Is this great aspect of the human adventure immoral? God, I hope not!





You also make this comment: And I think gay people may experience it tragically, though even they would have to admit it lacks one of the elements of tragedy, in that Ennis and Jack are not responsible for the bad outcome. They're victims, not tragic heroes, and they're not held accountable for anything, not even how they treat their wives, because, we're to understand, they have no choice.
I disagree with this. First of all, Ennis is held accountable for the way he treats Alma. She ends up divorcing him. That's a pretty big accountability. Also, you say that we are to understand that both Jack and Ennis have no choice and therefore one of the elements of tragedy is missing. Are you saying they had no choice in the paths their lives took? They chose to live a straight, closeted life because they were straight or so they thought. I believe Ennis could not accept that he was gay until late into his relationship with Jack and maybe only after Jack was taken from him. "Jack, I swear.", he said at the end. At this point he truly recognized what his love for Jack really was. Both were faced with choices through out their love. Each chose differently. Jack chose to make a life with Ennis; Ennis chose to deny that possibility. Jack chose to be more out of the closet than discretion would allow and suffered the consequences of that choice. Ennis chose to stay in the closet and must suffer the loneliness and sadness of forever losing Jack which resulted from that choice. To me, this is great tragedy.

Hey Jim,

Thanks for the thoughtful comment. Here are my responses:

I didn't say closeted gay men's wives are dead ends, I said that's how the movie presents Alma. The movie doesn't give you any sense of what Ennis is missing out on with her, b/c it's totally devoted to making you feel what he's missing out on with Jack. You talk about Alma as if she were a person who had more life than what we see onscreen. She's a character in a fictional movie--all we see is all there is.

In fact, your entire discussion involves projecting onto the movie. You engage in some interesting sociological speculation, but though the moviemakers, unlike Annie Proulx, invite the audience to project onto the story in this way, the movie doesn't do anything with such speculation. We have no more idea than Ennis and Jack do how many more gay guys are out there in Wyoming or what the others do about it.

As for cheating on your wife and lying to her, yes, it's always immoral, no matter what the sex of your partner is. That doesn't mean we can't understand why someone would do it, and even identify with his bad behavior, but cheating and lying are in themselves inescapably bad behavior.

And as for the "great tragedy" of Ennis and Jack's story, you don't describe it as something I recognize as literary tragedy. You describe it as pathos, the commonplace sense of something that's really, really sad. Literary tragedy involves more heroic action on the part of the tragic protagonist, so that we feel he's attempting as much as can be attempted in the situation given his character. And tragedy also has a visionary exaltation that takes us right up the door of death and suggests what's on the other side that has such a mysterious influence on our lives. Saying that "society won't let them be together" doesn't make it tragedy, even if it's true.

Thanks again for writing.

jim-you say that cheating on your wife is okay if you are a gay man "trapped" into the straight world?

Cheating is wrong, no matter what. Regardless of whether someone feels they "have" to conform, the truth is they really don't. Often our "prisons" are in our own minds. A man does not HAVE to pretend he is straight and decieve a woman.

It's the same logic my unhappily married aunt used to cheat on her husband. She did not love him, but only married him because she was into her 30's and "society" said she should get married. He did nothing for her sexually, and one night she confided in me that she wanted to have a lover on the side. She claimed that she deserved to be happy, that she had sacrificed what she wanted in order to make her mother and the rest of society happy. I told her it was wrong, and if she really didn't love him, to divorce him. Doesn't HE deserve to be freed so that he can find someone who really loves him rather than have a wife pretending to be in love with him?? What my aunt wanted was childish and selfish. She didn't want to leave her husband's paycheck and security and companionship. Or the apparent "normalcy" of being married.

Put yourself in an Alma's shoes: she hears this man promise to love and cherish her, she bears his children. But, she also suffers extreme pain. Imagine having a spouse who was distant and cold, who you KNEW wasn't sexually attracted to you. An Alma would think it was all her, that maybe she was undesirable or not a good enough wife. All those years wasted, knowing this man can't really stand the sight of you but not knowing why. Then imagine her "Ennis" telling her that he is perfectly justified in cheating on her all these years, because she "trapped" him. But really, the wife is just as much of a victim of his inability to be honest with himself.

Maybe, a gay man in Ennis or Jack's shoes WOULD have faced abuse and discrimination had he chosen not to marry in the first place, even if he had kept his desires pretty closeted. But sometimes the RIGHT thing to do is not always the EASIEST or most comfortable.

That's what I told my aunt. It won't be easy or comfortable to divorce her husband, but it is the right thing to do.

Hey Jennifer,

Interesting about your aunt. "sometimes the RIGHT thing to do is not always the EASIEST or most comfortable" puts the issue well.

I still feel that we're talking about the characters in the movie as if they were real people--"Put yourself in an Alma's shoes." It's fascinating to me how we have that urge, and with naturalism like Proulx's it makes perfect sense b/c she's fabricating something in the way of data. With a romance like Lee's movie, however, there's an invitation to do project, but it doesn't make nearly as much sense. Projecting blurs the experience on the screen. This may be why it's turning out to be so popular. People love the movie precisely b/c it's about whatever they want it to be about, it's about themselves.

Sorry, I guess we're not allowed to link.