USA, 2005

Director: Ang Lee

To my eyes, you couldn't ask for a more beautiful setting for a film than where most of Brokeback Mountain takes place. Even leaving aside the better-than-picture-postcard scenery of the (actually, Canadian) Rockies, the range country is stunning. It's a familiar sight for my partner and me after a few road trips through the West, and the footage of cloud-crowned green fields and cinderblock towns in summer light put me instantly at ease. Ang Lee's film of the Annie Proulx short story about love between two modern-day cowboys is like its setting: stark, quiet, and unyielding. If that quality soon enough made me ill-at-ease, it also made the film fresh and breathtaking.
The love story starts out almost idyllic but quickly becomes as complicated and painful as real life. A slew of great performances fleshes out the decades-long tale. Heath Ledger captures the center of the film as Ennis Del Mar, a taciturn, financially struggling career cowboy. It's a truly great, lived-in performance. And though I've enjoyed all of Lee's work at some level, this is his most mature film to date. Lee knows how to capture the tension in a scene between two people until I would almost rather walk out of the theater than watch it, and here he's made some of his most skin-crawling sequences yet. A few elements here echo his earlier films -- a confrontation during dishwashing as in Eat Drink Man Woman; Ledger as a stoic Westerner vs. Chow Yun-Fat's Eastern man-of-few-words, Li Mu Bai, in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; a suburban 1970s Thanksgiving scene in plainspoken Texas mirroring the uptight Hoods of Connecticut in The Ice Storm -- but he's gone beyond the desire to entertain us that's so clear in some of his previous work. The direction is low-key and straightforward, the soundtrack spare. The look is clean and realistic, suggesting the photographs of Robert Adams. Though the story of this forbidden love could have used less "forbidden" and more "love" -- scenes of real affection are few -- it remains a personal story with its symbolism set elegantly in the background. Brokeback has been drawing attention as a "gay movie," which it is. As a serious film focused on an adult gay love story not involving AIDS, featuring a big-name director and cast, it's pioneering in several ways. And for gay viewers both young and old, it's an important historical film. As the story moved forward from its beginning in 1963, I found myself aching for a sort of "first light" in the late Seventies when the prospects changed for two men together, at least in a few large cities. But Brokeback is much bigger than a gay film. It's about the American dream of autonomy and self-reinvention and the sometimes crushing limits on that dream. It's also about the idea of a primordial freedom in America's great wild and the steady encroachment of civilization. And it's about the iconography of the West, embodied in Jack Twist's rodeo shows and broad Texas life, versus the reality in Ennis's hard life and the bleak homestead of Jack's parents. Like the story of America, Brokeback is about liberty and its price.