A profile of Ennis Del Mar, born in the wrong era to openly express his feelings for another man.

Rating: Null/10 (29 May 2012)

I first saw this movie about 6 years ago, since then it has come under very much scrutiny from critics and fans alike. There are any number of interpretations of everything that happens in the story, and there are over 2300 user reviews right here on the IMDb. So I will not pretend to add anything new, however I am choosing to look at the story almost exclusively from the character that Heath Ledger plays so well, Ennis Del Mar. The following comments reflect my own points of view and I make no claims that anyone else should embrace them.
The story starts in 1963 when Ennis is around 19 or 20. He is just a poor young cowboy looking for some summer work and he becomes one of a two-person team to look after and protect a large herd of sheep grazing on Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming. Ennis is shy and hardly ever says more than the minimum, but he is engaged to a nice young lady and they plan to marry in the fall.
The other young cowboy is Jake Gyllenhaal as Jack Twist. Jack was occupying the tent and cooking, and Ennis would pitch a small tent and sleep among the sheep, riding back to the camp every afternoon to eat. One fateful afternoon it was beginning to get dark before Ennis left, so he decided to sleep near the camp fire under a blanket. But even in the summer it gets very cold at elevation, and on this night Jack eventually talked a shivering Ennis into the tent. Jack made a move, pulling Ennis' arm over him where Ennis discovered Jack in an aroused state. Initially recoiling in great surprise, soon Ennis and Jack consummated their new friendship.
It is important to keep in mind this is a work of fiction, so as a viewer we are required to quickly evaluate plausibility. From my vantage point, it is ONLY plausible if Ennis is homosexual deep to his core, otherwise he would have pulled away and rejected Jack's advances. He could not have "become homosexual" that night in the tent. (We know from later scenes that Jack was indeed homosexual and regularly sought other men, and even male prostitutes when that was his only option.)
So this created a great conundrum for Ennis, he knew from some childhood experiences and guidance from his father, being known to be homosexual will probably get you killed in short order. So when the summer was over and Jack went away, even though Ennis was in deep sorrow he went ahead with his marriage. Over the years he had two daughters to whom he showed much fatherly affection. But he never really loved his wife, he performed his "husbandly duty" but his thoughts were always with Jack, and looking forward to their next meeting, which might have been weeks or might have been years.
The story ends around 1983, and we see a scene of his oldest daughter, Alma Jr. talking to Ennis about her upcoming marriage. But Ennis is a broken man. He is long divorced, his wife knowing fully that he and Jack weren't really going fishing on all those trips over the years. Jack has died, perhaps from injury when a tire exploded as Jack's wife Lureen told him over the phone, or perhaps at the hands of several men who beat him to death, as we see in what appears to be a dream scene. Ennis is not like Jack, looking for another man, and he has no interest in looking for another wife. He was born in a time when he could not be who he really was, and he wasn't successful at pretending to be someone else.
Ennis's last words in the film are "Jack, I swear" as he is holding the old bloody shirt that had been hanging in Jack's closet for some years. It was the only thing he had left that he could touch and smell. There has been considerable discussion of what that phrase meant, but to me it is very clear. That phrase was used regularly where I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s. It was always used in a sense of exasperation, an all-encompassing phrase with a sigh which sums up everything and yet nothing of what might have just happened. For Ennis it was the unfortunate or fortunate, depending on how one wants to look at it, meeting of Jack which made his life everything it is, yet with nothing at all now to hold onto.
Randy Quaid is good as the sheep herding boss, Joe Aguirre. He observed the two men through high-powered binoculars, he knew what was going on. Michelle Williams is good as Ennis' wife Alma. Anne Hathaway is good as Lureen Newsome .