Two Cowboys Plus One Mountain Equals...

Rating: Null/10 (31 January 2006)

Brokeback Mountain is the extended communion of two strange, lonely, misfit souls. They meet outside a trailer in the dusty town of Signal, Wyoming circa 1962, both there looking for work; Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger), a taciturn ranch-hand whose family was wiped out in a car-wreck, and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), a faintly eccentric failed rodeo-rider. The gruff sheep-rancher Geary (Randy Quaid) gives them a job tending his flock over the summer; they head to the lonely heights of Brokeback Mountain to live with the wolves, the bears, the sudden hail-storms. Their shared solitude brings them closer than most men. Soon the job ends though, and it's back to their other lives: Ennis weds mousy Alma (Michelle Williams), fathers a couple of girls, discovers that married life ain't all it's cracked up to be; meanwhile Jack drifts back to Texas, tries the rodeo again and flops, meets a pretty young rider named Laureen (Anne Hathaway) whose father is a combine-salesman, marries her, settles into a life of semi-luxury. Neither man can get their summer together on Brokeback out of their minds. They meet for "fishing trips"; through the years they suffer their individual tribulations, seeking solace in each other's company, on the peaceful mountainside. United by inexpressible loneliness they drift through life, connected to no one really but each other, bound by their memory of that one summer, that unrecoverable bliss.
Ang Lee has fashioned a classic piece of Hollywood storytelling, and infused it with enough quiet, rustic poetry to distract one from the essential inconsequentiality of the characters. Lee has worked with life-sized characters before, in the Ice Storm, which dealt with a melancholy not unlike that which suffuses Brokeback Mountain, the sense of lives going nowhere, of yearnings impossible to express; here he trains his lens on a pair of nobodies whose only remarkable feature is their peculiar attachment to each other, and to the profound experience they once shared (that summer on Brokeback may have been the only time either of them ever really felt alive, at peace with themselves). The story amounts to a juxtaposition, the harmonious tranquility of Brokeback against the turmoil, confusion and unhappiness of domestic life. Lee never quite solves the problem of making this work; the mountain scenes have a spirituality to them that comes across more vividly than the banality of the characters' everyday lives. The characters feel at home up in the mountains, where the only threat is from nature, and the movie does too; they're much more uncertain at home, with their wives, their children, and the movie too seems awkward in these scenes, almost silly (a scene where Jack spars with his father-in-law at Thanksgiving dinner strikes a false note, and so do most of Ennis's scenes with Alma, where Michelle Williams comes across not long-suffering but merely petulant and immature). The movie seems to relax when it gets outside, seems to find its rhythm, but the necessity of condensing twenty years of living into a little over two hours forces on Lee a pace he doesn't seem comfortable with. The elegant construction of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon has been replaced by the choppy, time-skimming structure of the Larry McMurtry/Diana Ossana script, an expansion of an Annie Proulx short-story. The danger with this kind of story is that scenes which need to play on will feel truncated, that relationships will seem not fully fleshed-out, and this is exactly what happens to Brokeback Mountain. We get lots of Ennis and Jack together, especially in the first act, but little of Ennis and Alma beyond quarreling, and almost none of Jack and Laureen, who after meeting, marrying and having a kid barely share two words. There's a sense here of too much material being jammed into too small a space; the story might've resonated better had the different relationships gotten the same attention as the mountain scenes, or had they been excised altogether. The structure is limp, classical in the worst way, and only by an act of directorial will on Ang Lee's part does the whole shambling thing hold itself together.
Lee seems the perfect director to adapt Annie Proulx, whose stories often deal with misfit characters trying to find themselves; Lee has a handle on the turmoil wrought by frustrated passions (The Ice Storm is full of it), and a sense of wistfulness that can be quite haunting. He's also good at eliciting nuanced performances: in Brokeback he makes an actor out of pretty-boy Heath Ledger, who's good at talking through his teeth, and he makes fair use of Jake Gyllenhaal's natural weirdness, his oddly concave features, his suggestions of perversity. There's discretion to Lee's work, which is comforting given the nature of this story (an indiscreet director could've really butchered this, made it into some lame political statement). Lee brings a casualness to expansive material, a lack of epic pretense. Brokeback is no small-scale story masquerading as a neo-Western, no probing psychological piece, no treatise on behalf of certain groups. It's a solid, if unremarkable, piece of Hollywood storytelling, touching if not quite stirring, compelling if not quite memorable.