Random thoughts on a third viewing

Rating: 10/10 (29 January 2006)

Brokeback Mountain has finally come to my town, and I can finally view it at my leisure. It is a movie that rewards repeated viewings. There's been so much said about this film that there hardly seems to be any point in writing a review, but here at least are a few random observations.
Before this viewing I'd finally managed to get hold of the "story to screenplay" book. Larry McMurtry's essay, though only a couple of pages long, is a knockout piece of writing. One of the things he talks about is the contrast between the big landscapes and the small lives of the people in it. There's a recurring editing trick in the movie that makes me think of the same thing. I think they call it an inline cut, but at any rate it's where you first view an object (or a person) from a distance, then closer up from exactly the same angle.
Some visual parallels struck me for the first time on this viewing. When Ennis gets the first postcard from Jack, he strokes its border the same way he does with the postcard at the end of the film. Time and again we are shown that, for an outdoorsman, Ennis can be remarkably gentle with his hands, and this is another example of it. And when he gets the fatal postcard, the camera swings behind his shoulder to an angle reminiscent of the one we see in the dead rancher scene. His visit to the Twist home also subtly recalls his first meeting with Jack, with the truck being seen from its right as it pulls in, and Jack's mother at the door.
Another thing that struck me this time is the way Jack's posture and body language remain the same through the years, only, well, older. The passage of years takes a greater toll on him than on Ennis, if only because Ennis was never all that young to begin with. I've reversed my earlier opinion that they don't age Jack convincingly during the course of the film. The makeup tricks are there if you look for them, but *emotionally* the change in his appearance is right: he gets more drawn, more edgy, more brittle, and his costume and makeup reflect this change.
Jake Gyllenhaal is being robbed blind this awards season. Look how much he can convey with a hopeful rise of the eyebrows, or a hesitation in his speech. His character is finely drawn and all of a piece. But I also noticed this time how Heath Ledger actually manages to work some comic timing into his taciturn portrayal of Ennis. Little pauses mean a lot in this film. Oh, and how superbly Michelle Williams does the pent-up silences and the ensuing outbursts in the "Jack Nasty" scene. She's a wonderful *voice* actor on top of everything else.
I always marvel at the performances of the two older actors as Jack's parents. This time I noticed how much of the impact of Peter McRobbie's performance as the father comes from the asymmetrical lighting and the unnerving movement of his eyes. I've come to think of his character as "the black and white monster" because of the lighting: maybe he is seen black and white because that is how he sees the world. This is also the scene where religious objects hover fuzzily in the background, something I can recall from at least one Ingmar Bergman film I've seen. (My favourite Bergman film: Winter Light.) In one shot it's a cross, in another a cowboy hat hangs above Ennis' head like a halo.
In scene after scene you notice the subtly (well, everything in this film is subtle) atmospheric use of ambient sound and music. Little things like the fact that you already hear the gentle trickling of a river outside the tent after their first night together -- the river signifying, as somebody suggested here, the passage of time ("same river twice"). Or the sound of the wind in so many scenes. Or the tinny noises of the television sets and other electrical appliances in the domestic scenes. Or the way we cut from LaShawn's gabbiness to Alma Jr's quietness. I've come to love Gustavo Santaolalla's score as well, deceptively plain but full of unexpected cadences, tracking every nuance of mood. People rightly talk about the two tent scenes but the whole sequence in between them is every bit as remarkable, with shots of stark and disturbing beauty, and those strange woodwind tones in the soundtrack.
And with each viewing I marvel more than ever at Ang Lee's ability to weave together multiple emotional strands, as in the leadup to the first fishing trip, when we move in rapid succession from a sort of domestic farce to Alma's heartbreak to the liberating vistas of the mountains as the truck arcs its way towards them. Nobody can modulate emotional tone from scene to scene, or even within a scene, the way Lee can. At his best he can sustain this feat through an entire movie, as he does here. There's a kind of visual music that flows through the whole film.
More than anything else I've come to love the tempo, the rhythm, the texture of the film. There's a quiet warmth that runs right through it, a kind of savouring of ordinary life, of domestic things, of everyday toil, of companionship and solitude, of private griefs, of shared days and nights. Nothing is romanticized, yet nothing ever feels jaded. I'm no art connoisseur, but I vividly remember the effect that Millet's peasant paintings had on me when I first saw them, and there's something of the same spirit here. This is a film that, in the midst of the larger tragedy, never stops being grateful for the most commonplace things in life.