Brokeback Mountain as a Western

Rating: Null/10 (13 January 2006)

Warning, warning. Spoilers everywhere. Place spoilers, scene spoilers, minor plot spoilers.
This review best read by someone who has already seen the movie.
I'm a Californian, first, last, and always, but for the most part I grew up in the Gold country and Ranch country of the far Northern end. In any way that matters, I'm a Westerner with a Northwest edge. Yreka, a town firmly in Ranch Country shadowed by Mt. Shasta is still what I think of as my home town.
One set of grandparents sold their homestead in Saskatchawan and moved to Portland, Oregon. The other set farmed the family homestead near Halsey Oregon until they retired.
My wife has roots in Rural Idaho. My stepmother was reared in Colorado. My Uncle and Aunt lived in Nevada but retired to Arizona.
My family is about as Western as you can get if you don't include Texas.
I've got one sister in Anchorage Alaska and one sister in Riverton Wyoming.....
Yeah that Riverton.
Spoiler coming! Ennis for a time lives above the laundromat in Riverton with his wife.
Just for the record in case you don't or didn't stay for the credits: what you see on screen is from Alberta. Amongst other things, the real Riverton is a whole lot bigger town.
Riverton in the movie isn't the Riverton my new-phew still lives in, but I wondered if Heath Ledger paid my nephew as a speech coach because Ledger has nailed Wyoming speech.
I started this to talk about Brokeback as a Western.
Another Spoiler coming.
In the opening sequence Randy Quaid shows up to hire Ennis and Jack. Next time you watch this scene take careful note of Quaid's hat and walk. I think he's deliberately giving us a modernized version of John Wayne in Rio Bravo.
And what's the theme of Rio Bravo and half the Western's in the canon? A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do, which is the right and honorable thing, whether or not he wants to and whether or not it's in his best interest.
Western's are also often about the conflict between the big space and the loneliness of the human paths that seek to master it. (Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West is probably my favorite example. Every single one of the men ends up without Claudia Cardinale though all of them seem to want her.) Brokeback is clearly a Western. It's clearly about the Big Space. It's clearly about conquering loneliness or succumbing to it. It's about people I have known from tiny Western town all of my life who lead lives of quiet desperation, nobility, and pain.
Ennis's tragedy is that he feels compelled to do the "right thing" by his community and his daughters, when that "right thing" is clearly a tragic loss for him.
For a bit on the way home tonight, I kept saying to my wife "How can Ang Lee get our West?" Well, Duh, he had Larry McMurtry as a producer and writer and how can you get more West then that? If I take the Italian (Sergio Leone), I guess I have to take the Taiwanese