Cowboys Also Cry

Rating: 3/10 (9 June 2012)

"Brokeback Mountain" was released six years ago, and although I found it a deceitful concoction when I first saw it, I had never wrote anything about it until today. I doubted my first impression, because of the many prizes the film had won and the possible validity of the argument that "so many people cannot be wrong". But yes, many people may be simultaneously wrong, if one just thinks of all those who thought that our planet was flat. The film is not without values, mainly for responding to the need of visibility of the homosexual population: although it is not a self-representational product, it is a valid effort to make a vehicle that is neither a comedy of mistaken personalities nor proselytizing pornography. The film also celebrates physical love in open spaces, intimacy in communion with nature, something that has been mostly enjoyed by heterosexual couples stranded in paradise islands "a la Blue Lagoon". The problem with "Brokeback Mountain" starts with the artistic resources used to validate the sick behavior of a man, and have the approval of the audience, so everybody would enjoy a nice, long cry for the last 30 minutes. If it is only for the good use of very manipulative melodramatic effects, the script deserves all the prizes it won. In my case, I cannot help wondering if it is ethical asking of us, out of compassion (more akin to sentimentality than true pity), to side with Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger, in a great performance), a monster who, by the end of the film, has left behind a long chain of broken hearts, including a dead man: Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal), supposedly "his true love". For almost 90 minutes, "Brokeback Mountain" elaborates a character's biography to justify the reactions and answers of this being with such a peculiar name as Ennis Del Mar (maybe that's where it all started). An orphan raised by his brothers, taken out of school and a virgin, he has his first sexual experience with young cowboy Jack, without ever forgetting a childhood incident, when his father took him to see the dead body of a homosexual cowboy that was murdered by emasculation. Ennis hardly moves his lips when he talks, he is in constant denial, he is violent, paranoiac, possessive, jealous, he does not know how to dance (I remember in my old Psychology text books, that in the old days dancing was a requisite to reach maturity!), he does not travel, he is reduced to his little world, is afraid to face his own life and destiny ("Leave Texas", advises Jack to deaf ears), he imposes his rules in their relationship, and ends alone and a fetishist. On his part, Jack, a promiscuous alcoholic, is murdered, surely by any of those men he would pick up in the streets to satisfy his unsatisfied sexuality. The succession of traumatic events obviously turns Ennis into a suitable case for psychological treatment, and to take it out on him would be as vile as his own acts. However this is fiction unceasingly asking that we spectators opt for false compassion, as a result of manipulating elements to make him seem only a victim. With the possible exception of his daughter, all the women in this film are either passive, gooey, negative, or weak. Ennis treats them all badly, without even having to touch them. His wife has the good sense of asking for a divorce, but she lives in resentment for all the abuse she was subjected to. Outside his hometown, Jack's mother has her own husband to treat her bad, and Jack's wife is a cold, calculating woman. Ennis' marriage life is hell when compared to his lyrical escapades with Jack to Brokeback mountain: the babies constantly cry, a night of fireworks with the family ends in violence, the presence of his daughters create a little chaos in a supermarket; while in Jack's place, the relationship with his father-in-law explodes. In two or three occasions when Ennis' sickness is evident, the script "cures" him, as in the climatic scene when Jack, a few months before his death, rebels against the life of sex three times a year. Ennis threatens him, they embrace and then cry, with their knees on the dust. Suddenly and with no cinematic differentiation, a flashback shows them tenderly in love, sweetening the violent and dramatic moment that has just taken place in the present. It is necessary to stress that Jack is as sick as Ennis, but his drama is secondary, a mere cue in Ennis' psychological map. In short, this story of a peasant whose stubbornness and neurosis turn everybody's life into a mess, seems to be the closest to what the Hollywood industry would give us homosexuals on our own sexual orientation, and to what any audience would endure as "serious drama" on the relationship between two men: an aseptic film about sex (more than love), with little eroticism, where the only nude scene is by a woman. As Robert Altman used to say, the best part of a story begins when the motion picture is over. So quite probably in imaginary sequels, Ennis' daughters, as products of such a dysfunctional family, would become a transsexual and a vengeful prostitute, while Jack's son, with a similar background, would become the town sissy or the new diabolic politician of the state. There were other American films in 2005, more attractive than this one, and more deserving of our free time, as "Sideways", "Broken Flowers", "Syriana", "The Squid and the Whale", "The New World", "Sin City"... On the homosexual subject there have been productions from all corners of the world, including "Plan B" from Latin America, "Happy Together" from Hong Kong, and so on. All of them are far more interesting than "Brokeback Mountain". A lot more.