A Film Full Of Real Pain, Still It Is Cathartic To Watch.

Rating: 10/10 (22 December 2005)

A question, IS it better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all? Brokeback Mountain forces you to confront such conundrums. Heath Ledger stars as Ennis, a taciturn youth orphaned as a boy. He was raised by his siblings and he has never owned up to having any strong feelings of any kind, especially none for himself. One summer in 1963, he goes up to the titular mountain and along with Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) they are given jobs tending sheep.
One night, after consuming a pint of whiskey, these two young men have sex with each other. I won't say they "made love" because this first time it is just a rough bout of alcohol fueled sex. They could easily brush it off with a, "I was so drunk last night, I don't know what I did!", but they don't. Instead, before long, the rough mounting Ennis gave to Jack initially, slowly turns into mutual caressing, tender kissing and other playful physical contact.
Both are high school dropouts with little future. Neither got much nurturing from parents or siblings, so this sudden discovery that they are both worthy of love and that they have the capacity TO love is scary. This fear is made worse because they are two guys. Whoops! It ain't supposed to be like that!
Some reviewer's point out that Ennis and Jack have no words to describe what is happening to them but they do have words for what it's not. "I'm not a queer", Ennis tells Jack. "Neither am I", comes the reply. I have never seen a film with so much Homo-sex in it, but so little queerness as this one.
Ennis goes on to marry Alma, a plain girl and by all rights, this should be the end. If it were, then Ennis might have a chance at normal happiness, but the "love that dare not speak its name" is also the love that won't go away.
Four years later Jack sends a post-card saying he's coming by for a visit and Ennis is beside himself with anticipation. When Jack finally shows up, they greet with warm handshakes, hugs and then to their surprise and delight, they kiss with intensity. Ennis's wife sees this kiss and wisely says nothing. Yet, Michelle Williams quite brilliantly shows us the wife's pain as she watches her husband kiss another (and a man no less) with more passion than he has ever kissed her.
Ennis and Jack decide to keep up this relationship with quarterly "fishing trips" wherein they are gone for weeks at a time, but never seem to bring home any fish. Both of them move like zombies on autopilot between fishing trips, for it is only then they feel they can be happy.
Jack seems to have accepted that Ennis is his true love and he pushes for Ennis to settle down with him on a ranch together. It is the hopeful Jack who drives from Texas to Wyoming in an instant without thinking when he hears about Ennis's divorce. Jack also seems to have come to terms with his sexual attraction for men. In fact, when he can't have Ennis, he's off with the husband of one of his wife's friends or down in Mexico paying a male prostitute.
Later, when Ennis visits Jack's childhood home and we meet his bastard parents and see the sparseness of his loveless upbringing, we see that Jack has indeed overcome a lot. But Ennis, dear Ennis, poor doomed Ennis only has eyes for Jack. I don't think he would be happy with another man or even another woman.
Although Jack dies young in the film, it is Ennis who is the sad tragic character. The Chinese have it right, if you really want to hurt somebody, don't kill them; just let them live. Till the day Ennis dies he will have a dull ache in his heart named Jack. He'll also have the pain of knowing he could have been happy with Jack but he didn't act on it, and probably even drove Jack away.
Brokeback Mountain wisely does not blame society for this dysfunction in Ennis. It would be too easy to place them in a blatantly homophobic environment. Homophobia is alluded to in the film, but clearly, in this case, the fault is not in society's inability to understand the love between Ennis and Jack, but in Ennis's inability to understand it. "If you can't fix it, you have to stand it", is how Ennis sees his duty.
Taking a cue from the philosophical idea that you can never really understand a thing until it is taken out of everyday context; this thing called "love" becomes problematic if the object of your affection is not what you think it should be. Meaning, if Ennis had felt this strong love for a female, he WOULD have done something about it, but when Cupid shot the arrow into his heart, the name on the arrow was Jack. Nothing in his experience had prepared him for that, so he effectively shut down, even though Jack wants to live with him, he is too tortured to make the leap into Jacks more than willing arms. It is true, the strongest prisons are the ones we build for ourselves.
Heath Ledger is excellent and so is Gyllenhaal, although Ledger has the harder role, emoting without saying or doing much, unlike the carefree Jack. The film-making here is solid and classical in style, there is no attempt to deconstruct the western genre here. It is a love story pure and simple, a doomed love story and so belongs in the realm of Romeo and Juliet, Gone With The Wind, Manhattan and Titanic. Brokeback Mountain is a touching and well-crafted story and film.