How Not to Tell A Tragic Love Story

Rating: 5/10 (15 January 2006)

Heath Ledger is just extraordinary as Ennis. He carried this role with such skill and authenticity. I really think he's one of those gifted actors who can truly act almost any part he's given. Jake Gyllenhaal as Jack is good. So are Anne Hathaway as Jack's wife Lureen, and Michelle Williams, as Jake's wife Alma.
I really like the cinematography. There are breathtaking big sky scenes, with a movingly austere beauty. Country and small-town scenes are exquisitely composed and depicted as well. Night scenes are delightful.
My main disappointment is with the story, or the script, itself. And the script is so inadequate that to me it overwhelms the movie's remaining strong features.
I have not read Annie Proulx's short story. But the story in the movie version is primarily, IMHO, a Love Story. A Love Story of a special kind: Tragic Forbidden Love. This kind of Love Story takes deft handling to bring it off; and it just plain doesn't work for me in this movie.
Compare other well known Forbidden Love Stories: Romeo & Juliet, Lancelot & Guinevere, Tristan & Isolde; Nabokov's Lolita. A modern movie version of Tristan and Isolde is in movie theatres at the same time as Brokeback Mountain, and they really make an interesting contrast. More on that later.
Surely what is in common in all these tales is that as long as the Love Story is borne in Fantasy, it carries all kinds of special features that we attach to the Special (if Fantastic) World of Love. The Forbidden Love is carefully cultivated, with plenty of hints, suggestions and flirtations between Lovers. Then Love encounters Reality: and Tragedy results. In each case, we feel the Love very acutely; and we feel the Tragedy very acutely.
Compare Brokeback Mountain. Almost nothing prepares us for the initial sexual encounter. When it does happen, we have these two men, who have almost no connection, proceed post-haste to kissing and anal sex. This is perhaps credible for Jack: the implication is that he's experienced in this area. But Ennis ... ? Ennis who, as a child, was shown a man's dead body, brutally murdered for engaging in this kind of sex? There could be some development to get Ennis from that kind of past to anal sex with Jack in the present. But there's no hint of this in the script.
Likewise, we see Ennis and Jack becoming friends *after* having sex. I guess this is consistent with the modern myth of how intimate relationships develop. And in terms of (say) Fantasy, that sequence can certainly work in a movie. But again, in terms of the real-life context of a "realistically" styled movie, the sequence to me is very unconvincing, unless there is some kind of development. It's not in the script, though.
The triangulating couples ... Jack & Ennis, and Jack & Lureen, and Ennis & Alma ... are unconvincing to me in many respects.
For example, we have Ennis & Alma waiting for Jack to come to town the first time: then Ennis and Jack start making out in front of the building, in the street, within easy view. What Forbidden Love Story has the Forbidden Love so much in the open? And remember, this is supposed to be 1960s Wyoming; and Ennis is supposed to have deeply etched memories of what can happen to a man who does things with another man. And yet it is *Ennis* who grabs Jake, ignores the public place, and starts making out.
Then Alma sees them making out. Alma's face looks almost comically nonreactive. The audience I was in laughed. Then we see Alma's face in painful shock. The audience was then silent. This sets up an amazing pattern for the rest of the movie: the Forbidden Love's consequence to Someone Else is shown, but is first undermined by humor. We are allowed brief glimpses of each wife's pain, but always it's preceded by humor that (I suppose) is intended to minimize the pain for the audience. Contrast Tristan & Isault. The dark side of Forbidden Love ... Treachery, Pain and Suffering ... is shown full force. It's part of what makes Tragic Love so Tragic.
Alma never questions Ennis about his infidelity, until long after their divorce. The eventual confrontation dialog implies she's just figuring out that the fishing trips aren't fishing trips. How is this credible? She knew from day one. Both wives are depicted as a cross between the comical and the sad. Other than that, we aren't given enough insight into them to really sympathize. Similarly, all scenes with the children show them as happily oblivious to what's going on. Indeed, if there's any indication that the children, or their parents, are aware that the Forbidden Love might be causing any kind of problems for the children, I missed it. Except, indeed, for some additional odd use of misplaced, scornful, humor.
Some symbolism was heavy-handed. For example, the early scenes with Jack and Ennis amid a sea of white sheep, followed by later scenes in which the wives are depicted with white light engulfing them from time to time seemed calculated to help us view their marriages as full of sterile, boring sameness. Contrast the far richer, deeper relationships in Tristan and Isolde.
Don't get me wrong: there are wonderful, touching scenes. Many between Jack and Ennis; and a couple of lovely scenes between Ennis and his daughter; and a few others. A good Forbidden Love Story has a lot to commend itself from my angle. Some of the statements ... "We're stuck" "It could be better" "It could be more" ... have wonderful evocations of the Love Story tradition of Longing and Hope and Desire that can be challenging and complex and deeply moving ... in a well told Love Story, that is. However, in this movie, the storyline and script consistencies overwhelm the unfolding of the Story.