To those disappointed

Rating: 10/10 (26 January 2006)

Well. I read the story before I saw the movie, which is pretty faithful to the original story. The first time I read it, I was eager to know what the story is, how much sex is in it, etc.. And I felt the story was pretty thin after I read it. Nothing major and heavy. Then after two months, I was bored and reread the story, slowly and I started to fully appreciate it. Ang Lee said in an interview that he once complained to the author how hard it was to adapt the story. One of the difficulty I can see is that the story doesn't disclose information about characters right away when things happen. For example, the flash back scene. In the story, right after the quarrel when Jack and Ennis last met, it goes like this: "What Jack remembered and craved in a way he could neither help nor understand was the time that distant summer on Brokeback when Ennis had come up behind him and pulled him close, the silent embrace satisfying some shared and sexless hunger. " It is a memory Jack cherished and held on to. It is one of the few times that Ennis actually initiated intimacy and expressed his feelings to Jack. It is a proof to Jack that Ennis, though he would never say so and would probably seldom express again, actually loves Jack. It is a memory that supported Jack through all these twenty lonesome years. However, such an important scene was not mentioned when the story and the movie first told their stories on brokeback mountain. At that time, it was rough, casual, like a fling, began and ended.
So I totally understand why people complain that there were not enough love between Jack and Ennis on BrokeBack Mountain. It was meant that way. Rough, casual, like a fling. That is how the story appear to be, to viewers and to themselves, just like real life. But then 20 years later, looking back, things began to take on additional meanings. That is why many have described the movie as subtle and haunting.
After I read the story the second time, nothing happened immediately. But when I was driving home I thought of Jack's shirt, how Jack had always loved Ennis deeply ever since Brokeback Mountain but never told Ennis so, how he actually felt when he only mentioned so slightly to Ennis, let us get a ranch together... totally cool about it like nothing important just something slipped through his mind; how he must have felt when Ennis time and again said no, disappointed and postponed; and how much he loved Ennis that he kept coming back. When I saw the movie, during the last scene when Ennis and Jack met, on hearing that Ennis cannot make August, Jack uttered the 'quit you' line, I just sobbed uncontrollably. :) But then again, the shirt scene is the last scene in the movie. Without the knowledge, the last meeting may well just be another quarrel. It almost seems like the movie as well as the story, rewrites itself many times along the way, with each piece of new information about past being revealed. To me, it is unique in that way; but it does require people to keep thinking about it after the film ends and I totally understand if people don't (I didn't the first time) they can see the film lacking.