Not a gay cowboy film; it's much grander than that.

Rating: 10/10 (8 February 2006)

When I read the Lee Harris review excerpted below I thought, "Yes! That is the problem with the 'gay cowboy'characterization of this film. It's too narrow, too limiting. These guys act, talk and live more like me and most of my male friends (except that we don't have sex with each other) than my gay friends act, talk and live (except that they do have sex with each other)." Ennis and Jack do not fit any convenient label and cannot be defined by their sexual life. This will anger some men who identify themselves as gay and want to appropriate Ennis and Jack as "our people because they have sex with each other" as well as some men who identify themselves as straight and want to see Ennis and Jack as "not like us because they have sex with each other". All I know is that I don't have sex with men, but Ennis and Jack sure seem like "one of us" to me. If this film fosters that awareness, I think it would do a whole lot for the cause of tolerance.
This film is about two men who cannot and will not be defined by what they do sexually. At last, a film which doesn't try to define complex human beings as "gay" or "straight" or the equally vapid "bisexual".
These fully developed human characters get thrown together, develop an emotional connection, spontaneously have drunken sex and then fall in love, but never want to be anything other than who they are -- cowboys. They're not gay men who are forced to marry and have kids by a straight-dominated culture. They get married and have kids because that's also part of their nature. That's what makes this a tragedy in the classic sense of the word. Their circumstances and internal conflicts lead them to an inevitable doom and it's one full of poignancy, one worth grieving. Can we please stop trivializing them by trying opportunistically to co-opt them as one-dimensional poster boys for gay liberation or as the focus of hatred for the anti-homosexual backlash, and just see them as the richly human characters that they are as portrayed on the screen??? I'm just grateful that Ang Lee took this amazing story and made it even better on screen, and that he and all of his actors did so with such devotion, empathy and skill. If this film doesn't break your heart in the most beautiful way, I don't know what would.
Excerpts from Lee Harris:
Though it is often spoken of as a love story between two gay cowboys, it isn't really that at all. It is a love story between two "homophobic" men -- two genuinely macho guys who felt visceral revulsion at everything that our culture has come to associate with the word gay. Who "forced" the two cowboys into "normal" marriage? And what power forced them to remain in the closet and told them that they had to stay in Wyoming and Texas? On the day after the two young men first have sex with each other, on the slopes of Brokeback Mountain, they have an exchange in which both emphatically deny that they are homosexual. One of the characters, Ennis del Mar, remains completely faithful to the other; the other, Jack Twist, when he seeks homosexual release, does not go to an American gay bar, but crosses the border to pick up a straight Mexican hustler. The last thing he is looking for is a gay man. Nothing could be more foreign to them than what is now called gay culture. The poignancy of their story lies precisely in the fact that neither of the two heroes can escape by this route. That is the reason Brokeback Mountain looms so expressively throughout the movie -- it is the only place where they can love each other and still remain men in their own eyes. To come down from the mountain, and settle down into gay domesticity is not an option for them, because it would rob them of their dignity as men. Their only escape was to return to the isolation of the mountain, where, by themselves, they could achieve what even the most gay tolerant society could not give them -- a sense of manliness.
Ennis and Jack certainly knew they loved each other passionately. Yet both of them were equally convinced that,despite their love, they were normal guys. Their resistance to being labeled was the noblest expression of human dignity: the refusal to let others treat us as things. All that they knew, all that they could be comfortable with, was the world of normal guys. It was where they belonged, and it was where they were at home. It was only on Brokeback Mountain that they could love each other passionately and still hold up their heads like men. Yet this was precisely the source of the tragic dimension of the story. Brokeback Mountain was not a life, but an escape from life. It could never become for them a permanent place of abode. Both of the cowboys were heroic enough to keep their love for each other alive over the course of two decades, but it was a love that could only find fulfillment when they had left the world behind and had ascended to the isolation and seclusion of the mountain. Thus their rebellion against the way of the world ended as all such rebellions end -- in the inevitable defeat of the rebels and the victory of the world. There was no other outcome to the story that was possible.
Brokeback Mountain is a genuine work of art, and not a piece of propaganda, however well-intentioned.