Discovering Love: The Longing to Make It Fit

Rating: 10/10 (17 December 2005)

E. Annie Proulx visited a cowboy bar in Wyoming and felt an underlying eroticism seething in that most macho of possible places. That observation translated into a courageous short story in 1997, a study of love between two cowboys whose world would never condone such feelings (remember Laramie?), and so 'Brokeback Mountain' was born in New Yorker Magazine. Now that tender and heartbreaking tale of hidden, durable, passionate love between two young men trapped in a society that will not allow such feelings has been luminously transformed in to a film: it is rewarding to see how successful that long journey became.
The story is so well known that it need not be summarized beyond the brief statement that two nineteen year old young men, both with histories of abandonment, need, and pain, find physical attraction in the cold nights on Brokeback Mountain while guarding sheep, and though both assure each other that neither is gay, the love creeps out of the night physicality into the daytime sunny thrills of feeling alive and cared for. After only a couple of months, their job completed, they part ways, each marrying, having children, but over almost twenty years they periodically reconnect, understanding the depth of their forbidden love, and cope the best they can. Divorces ensue, promises of being together permanently are thwarted by a number of reasons, and the while the story evaporates into the lonely landscape of Wyoming, the love that bonded them, a love they could never 'own', ends.
Ang Lee molds this magnificently poignant love story with grace, style, realism, and bravery. Proulx's story is made visual by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana's screenplay and while the script is true to the story on the whole, there is much added business about the wives and children and parents that perhaps is necessary for moviegoers to 'get it', but in this viewer's mind is less sensitive than the extended silences within the vast spaces of Wyoming that made Proulx' story so quietly and powerfully understated. Heath Ledger is superb as Ennis Del Mar but Jake Gyllenhaal is equally as strong as Jack Twist: together they create a chemistry racked with pain as well as bliss and make their characters totally believable. Michelle Williams does well as Ennis' long suffering wife Alma, while Anne Hathaway remains Anne Hathaway, a lady far too elegant to be convincing as the cowgirl Lurene the Jack marries in the vacuum without Ennis.
But criticisms are few (the only major one is that Gyllenhaal has not been sufficiently recognized for his brilliant portrayal in Heath Ledger's shadow). This is a beautiful film that addresses love and all its permutations and it is so refreshing to see a story of this depth and significance so quietly and tenderly placed before the theater audience. Highly recommended. Grady Harp, December 05