Brokeback Mountain, 2005 romantic drama which is often considered one of the most ground-breaking films in past two decades and the important chapter in the history of LGBT cinema, was actually part of much larger Hollywood trend. That trend was partly inspired by Hollywood’s frustration with George W. Bush's victory in the 2004 presidential election, an event often interpreted as triumph of conservative social values Bush has promoted, the very values liberal, left-wing and “progressive” Hollywood was not in line with. The very next year, Hollywood decided to show that it was not only unimpressed with this new alleged shift to the right, but was actually more willing to openly defy it. And there was little that could rile up American religious conservatives more than an affirmative portrayal of homosexuality on the big screen. This resulted in unprecedented line-up of films with a homosexual as the main character or explicit homosexual themes.
The most talked among those film was Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee's epic melodrama, whose main concept, ironically, had been subject of a parody in one of the early South Park - a love story between two gay cowboys. Brokeback Mountain was also the most subversive towards American conservative worldview in other views - not only does the concept "deconstruct" cowboys as an icon of American traditional values, but the story takes place in Wyoming, a state that is the ideological opposite of liberal and Democratic Hollywood as a stronghold of conservative Republicans. To add insult to injury to conservative Bush supporters, Wyoming is also the home state of Bush's Vice President Dick Cheney, who had to reconcile his conservative views with the fact that his daughter was a lesbian.
The film is based on a short story by Annie Proulx, a writer from Wyoming whose award-winning novel The Shipping News ended up as a spectacular "Oscar" flop few years earlier. The beginning is set in 1963 when two young men - the taciturn cowboy Ennis Del Mar (played by Heath Ledger) and the extroverted rodeo rider Jack Twist (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) - get a job guarding sheep on Brokeback Mountain. The job is hard and boring, but time passes quickly when the two boys become friends, and after one night, "lubricated" with alcohol, their friendship takes on a sexual dimension. After returning from the mountain, their "thing" - as they called their relationship - ends and each goes their own way. Both will try to start a "normal" life that includes wives and children - Ennis marries a fiancée Alma (played by Michelle Williams), and Jack is settles with Lureen Neesome (played by Anne Hathaway), the daughter of a Texas millionaire he met at a rodeo.
However, when Jack sends a letter to Ennis, he replies and their reunion leads to a flood of emotions suppressed for years. The two lovers then go on further reunions, explained to their respective families as "fishing trips". But as the years go by, these trips become an increasing source of tension and conflict - the relatively well-off Jack fantasises about renting a ranch and living together with Ennis, while the Ennis, who remained poor, has a better idea of how the discovery of their secret would be received by people around them.
Ang Lee had a great reputation among American and world film critics even before this achievement, but few films like Brokeback Mountain have led to such a salvo of panegyrics and such a unanimous proclamation as a masterpiece. Film premiered at Venice Film Festival where it received Golden Lion, which was followed by Golden Globe for Best Drama and series of Oscar nominations, becoming one of the clearest favourites for the prize in the history of Academy Awards. However, even by that time, experienced suggested that the pre-Oscar buzz often didn’t differ much from propaganda campaigns for summer blockbusters. A similar thing could be said about Brokeback Mountain, which owed a good part of its awards and nominations primarily to the controversial theme, and less to its inherent quality
If it weren't for these "controversies", i.e. if the homosexual main characters were replaced with heterosexual main characters, the result will be an average Hollywood film or perhaps even an a failure. Especially when compared to The Bridges of Madison County, a melodrama made a decade earlier, dealing with similar themes and set in the same time period.
Unlike Eastwood in his unpretentious but skilfully made romantic drama, Lee has subordinated his film to the Oscar-winning formula, where the important ingredients are epic length and demanding roles. The film's problems with pace can be noticed at the very beginning, where Lee tries to compete with Leone's creation of tension in the opening scenes of Once Upon a Time in the West, but here, unlike with Leone's classic, there is no dramatic justification for that.
The second part of the film, on the other hand, is burdened with a series of subplots and vignettes that take time, but should therefore provide opportunities for supporting actors to collect a few Academy nominations for their performances. In all of this, Anne Hathaway fared quite poorly, whose attempt to break out of the Disney princess image will most likely be remembered more for her awful wig than for the quality of her acting.
In strictly technical termns, the film is disappointment, except for Rodrigo Prieto's cinematography in scenes depicting the natural beauty of the Canadian Rockies standing for Wyoming. Gustavo Santaolalla's music is less memorable than the country classics the film's heroes listen to from the jukebox.
If someone in this film deserves praise, it is primarily Heath Ledger. Not only did he jeopardise his status as a heartthrob for teenage girls and his future career by agreeing to act in what is, by Hollywood standards, an unprecedented explicitly sexual scenes between two men, but with his performance he extracted the potential from the story and characters that the screenwriters or director did not know or could not use. Ledger skillfully exploited the fact that the roles of the two Wyoming cowboys were divided between people of different origins - an Australian who started his acting career with 69 cents in his pocket and the child of a respected Hollywood family. Ledger adeptly suggested the differences between the poor, introverted and realistic Ennis on the one hand and the relatively well-off, dissolute and extroverted Jack on the other - differences that are also visible in the way they consume and understand their relationship.
Gyllenhaal also deserves praise, although Ledger deserved Oscar more - among other things, because his character aged much more convincingly on screen. Ledger, who, while shooting the film, had daughter with his on-screen and off-screen partner Michelle Williams, would ultimately win Oscar for his role of Joker in The Dark Knight.
Ironically, what made this film historically important wasn’t the Oscar win, but actual Oscar snub. It was so shocking, that AMPAS got accused of homophobia and the actual winner, Crash, became despised among “hip” bien pensant circles. Not wanting the same thing to happen again, Hollywood began homosexuality in its films not as aberration or even the option, but as a norm.
RATING: 5/10 (++)
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