Ang Lee (2005)
‘They were raised on small, poor ranches in opposite corners of the state, Jack Twist in Lightning Flat up on the Montana border, Ennis del Mar from around Sage, near the Utah line, both high school dropout country boys with no prospects, brought up to hard work and privation, both rough-mannered, rough-spoken, inured to the stoic life.’
This is how Annie Proulx describes the two main characters at the start of her short story Brokeback Mountain, which appeared in 1997 in the New Yorker and was published in her 1999 collection of ‘Wyoming stories’, entitled Close Range. Ennis and Jack first meet in 1963, when ‘neither of them was twenty’. They work throughout the summer herding sheep together ‘above the Forest Service land on Brokeback Mountain’. They set up camp: at night, one of them sleeps in the tent; further up the mountain, the other stays with the sheep and keeps a lookout for coyotes. Although Ennis is notably taciturn, he and Jack get on well. The nocturnal routine is broken when they have too much to drink one evening. Ennis, the shepherd, is in no fit state to ride back to the flock. It’s so cold that Jack encourages him to sleep in the tent and Ennis eventually agrees. During the night, Jack makes a sexual advance. Ennis initially recoils but almost as quickly penetrates Jack – ‘nothing he’d done before but no instruction manual needed’. The sexual relationship continues and the pair’s friendship deepens during the rest of their time on Brokeback Mountain. When the assignment ends, they part company. Ennis, as he’d planned, weds his fiancée Alma. They have two children, both girls, within the next couple of years. Ennis works at a series of ranch and other manual jobs, while Jack tries unsuccessfully to make a living riding bulls in rodeo. He drops financially lucky, however, when he marries a girl called Lureen, whose father runs a successful farm machinery business in Texas. Jack and Lureen settle there and have a baby boy.
A few months after the birth of Jack’s son – four years since the summer of Brokeback Mountain and they last had contact – Ennis receives a postcard:
‘Friend this letter is a long time over due. Hope you get it. Heard you was in Riverton. Im coming thru on the 24th, thought Id stop a buy you a beer. Drop me a line if you can, say if your there.’
Exhilarated but laconic as ever, Ennis writes back ‘You bet’ and gives Jack his address. When Jack turns up there and as soon as they see each other, the young men hug each other ‘mightily’ and can’t stop. Their violent, prolonged embrace is witnessed by Alma from the apartment window. Shocked and horrified, she hears her husband saying that he and Jack are going out for a drink and ‘Might not get back tonight we get drinkin and talkin’. Ennis and Jack spend the night in a motel where they have sex and discuss their relationship and what happens next. After this, they develop a routine of spending a few days alone together a couple of times each year, on what are described to their wives as ‘fishing trips’. They always go to mountain country but never return to Brokeback.
Ennis’s marriage to Alma, after a period of ‘slow corrosion’, ends in divorce. Jack’s marriage survives but there are no more children and Lureen is increasingly preoccupied with helping to run her father’s business, which she eventually takes over. To Jack’s frustration, the pattern of only occasional meetings continues even after Ennis is unattached. (Like his Dickensian namesake, Jack Twist asks for more.) Their last meeting is in May 1983. Jack is looking forward to the next time in August but, shortly before the end of their trip, Ennis says he’ll have to postpone until November: he needs to work through August. This provokes a furious argument. It culminates in Jack’s exclaiming, in exasperation, ‘I wish I knew how to quit you’ and Ennis breaking down. But only briefly: by the time they part, ‘somehow, as a coat hanger is straightened to open a locked car and then bent again to its original shape, they torqued things almost to where they had been, for what they’d said was no news’. Some time afterwards, Ennis writes to Jack to confirm November as the next possible date. The postcard is eventually returned, ‘stamped DECEASED’.
Ennis visits Jack’s parents, who still live in Lightning Flat. Jack’s father is hostile and suspicious but his mother invites Ennis to look at what used to be Jack’s room. Ennis finds in a closet there a bloodstained shirt. He realises this is his own blood, the result of:
‘… a gushing nosebleed on the last afternoon on the mountain when Jack, in their contortionistic grappling and wrestling, had slammed Ennis’s nose hard with his knee. He had staunched the blood which was everywhere, all over both of them, with his shirtsleeve, but the staunching hadn’t held because Ennis had suddenly swung from the deck and laid the ministering angel out in the wild columbine, wings folded.’
Ennis is struck by the weight of the shirt. He finds inside it another one, ‘his own plaid shirt, lost, he’d thought, long ago in some damn laundry’. Yet here it is, ‘stolen by Jack and hidden here inside Jack’s own shirt, the pair like two skins, one inside the other, two in one’. Ennis takes the shirts away with him. He buys a postcard of Brokeback Mountain from a local gift shop. He pins it up in the trailer where he now lives alone. On the wall, below the postcard, he hammers in a nail. He puts on the nail a coat hanger (a wire hanger – the kind that can ‘be bent again to its original shape’). He places on the hanger the two shirts.
I’m quoting plenty from the short story – partly because I admire it but mainly because the film of Brokeback Mountain is remarkably faithful to the source material and concerned to translate accurately many of Annie Proulx’s words and images. This is a screen adaptation of a piece of literature that is intent on doing honour to the original and the foundation for achieving this is an admirable screenplay by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. Brokeback Mountain was a sad movie to watch when it appeared ten years ago. It’s even sadder now watching the late Heath Ledger in the leading role of Ennis Del Mar[1]. The combined skills of Ledger and the director, Ang Lee, make Ennis one of the most remarkable characters in twenty-first century American cinema to date. He never has much money. His sexual and emotional experience is impoverished too. He truly is ‘inured to the stoic life’. To put it another way, and in Ennis’s own words, ‘if you can’t fix it you got a stand it’.
On its release, Brokeback Mountain was commonly described as the story of ‘two gay cowboys’ but Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist are different sexual sensibilities. It’s implied from the start of the film that Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal) isn’t a stranger to homosexual feelings. He and Ennis report to the trailer office to sign up for herding work. They wait for some time before the foreman (Randy Quaid) arrives to open up. As the pair stand outside the office, Jack watches Ennis furtively through the wing mirror of his jeep. There’s a moment, during the early days on Brokeback Mountain, when Jack sees that Ennis has stripped naked to wash; this time, he doesn’t watch but he averts his gaze with evident determination. It’s Jack who makes the first move inside the tent. When they go to the motel, Ennis tells Jack he hasn’t looked at another man in the four years since they last met. ‘Me neither[2],’ Jack replies – the same words he used in response to Ennis’s insistence, shortly after their first night together on Brokeback, that ‘I’m not no queer’. Annie Proulx makes it clear, however, that, since he last saw Ennis, Jack ‘had been riding more than bulls, not rolling his own’. He sometimes crosses the border into Mexico; in one sequence, we see him cruising there one night. (This isn’t one of the film’s better moments – its darkly lurid, playing-with-fire atmosphere is too familiar.) We also see Jack, in his growing impatience with Ennis’s stubborn self-denial, attracted by the offer of spending time with another man for whom, like Jack, married life isn’t enough.
Ennis is a more complex and equivocal personality. When he tells Jack ‘I’m not no queer’, he isn’t simply in denial. (And his choice of words reflects his usual use of language rather than a revealing double negative.) You can believe not only that Ennis has never previously had sex with a man but that, until this opportunity presents itself, he’s never wanted to. It’s not a matter of his having subdued homosexual desire; rather that the possibility of physical intimacy with another man hasn’t occurred. We don’t know the extent of Ennis’s relationships with girls before he meets Jack but there’s little evidence of sexual problems in the early stages of his marriage. The only discordant note is struck when, one night in bed, he enters Alma from behind and we see her uncomfortable face. In the motel, however, Ennis tells Jack about a traumatising event of his boyhood (part of the below is voiceover to a flashback to Ennis as a child):
‘Ennis There was these two old guys ranched together down home, Earl and Rich. They was a joke even though they was pretty tough old birds. They found Earl dead in a irrigation ditch. They’d took a tire iron to him, spurred him up, drug him around by his dick till it pulled off …
Jack You seen that?
Ennis I was what, nine years old? Dad made sure I seen it, me and my brother KE. Hell, for all I know, he done the job. If he was alive and was to put his head in that door right now you bet he’d go get his tire iron. (Pause) Two guys livin’ together? No way. We can get together once in a while way the hell out in the back a nowhere …’
Retaining this memory doesn’t conflict with the idea that Ennis doesn’t know, until Brokeback Mountain, that he might enjoy gay sex. What he witnessed as a boy does, though, make clear why he considers a full-time relationship with Jack an impossibility. It’s also the basis for Ennis’s conviction that Jack’s death was a homophobic killing. In their one and only conversation, on the telephone, Jack’s widow tells Ennis that her husband was killed in an accident. We can see from her face, though, that Lureen knows otherwise and perhaps Ennis hears it in her voice. The conviction becomes certainty in Ennis’s mind when he visits Jack’s parents and perceives the father’s loathing of his son.
The circumstances of Brokeback Mountain led to the expression of Ennis’s homosexual feelings. The circumstances of his subsequent life, particularly the early years post-Brokeback, enable him to put the lid back on these feelings – something which Ennis, now that he knows what he’s capable of, wants to do. Work and domestic responsibilities take up time for both men – although I find it somewhat contrived, both in the short story and the film, that it takes Jack, who doesn’t suppress his sexuality the way Ennis does, four years to renew contact. Jack stays in Ennis’s mind, however, as a ‘one shot thing’ (the phrase he and Jack use on Brokeback Mountain to describe what’s happening there). Plenty of viewers of the film will find it unconvincing that Ennis is a gay man who doesn’t appear to be sexually attracted to any man except Jack – but Ennis’s sexuality isn’t as simple as that suggests. Jack is the only one for negative and for more positive reasons. It’s Ennis’s fears about the implications of practising homosexuality that cause him both to shut up shop in terms of adult relationships and strictly to limit the time he spends with Jack. Yet a consequence of these privations is to confirm Jack as singular and precious to Ennis.
After they’ve divorced and Alma (Michelle Williams) has remarried, Ennis goes for a Christmas meal with her, the children and Alma’s new husband. In the kitchen after the meal, Alma washes up and Ennis dries; she takes the opportunity to tell him that and how she knows his ‘fishing trips’ with Jack were a fiction. Ennis reacts fiercely: he feels compelled to keep denying the truth of his relationship with Jack – even though his marriage is no longer at stake, even though doing so is increasing his isolation (and that will only get worse). The kitchen-sink clash with Alma sends Ennis storming from the house and into an argy-bargy with a car driver in the street outside. This is the latest incident in a persuasive pattern in Ang Lee’s storytelling: having sex with Jack – or, as in this case, the stirring up of troublesome feelings about Jack – is repeatedly proximate to physical violence on Ennis’s part. On Brokeback Mountain, some of this could be called horse play but the fight between Jack and Ennis immediately before they part company at the end of the herding assignment is something more, and startling. It’s an expression of anger and anguish that, when they come back down to earth from the mountain, there’s no way of maintaining what went on up there.
The film generated a good deal of theorising as to whether the main characters were gay or bisexual. If the latter means physically capable of sex with women and men, then Ennis and Jack clearly are bisexual. If bisexual means sexually attracted to both sexes, it’s more arguable. But this kind of definition of sexuality seems almost beside the point. What matters is that Ennis and Jack engage in homoerotic sex and that their sexual feelings for each other resurface. As Jack says to Ennis in the motel, ‘we got us a situation here’. That situation is a society in which sexual intercourse between men is not only morally abhorred but, for most of the years of Ennis and Jack’s relationship, legally prohibited: sodomy wasn’t decriminalised in Wyoming until 1977.
Annie Proulx admired the film on its original release and praised Heath Ledger particularly. In more recent years, she has said she wishes she’d never written Brokeback Mountain. ‘There are countless people out there who think the story is open range to explore their fantasies and to correct what they see as an unbearably disappointing story,’ she told the Wall Street Journal in 2012. In an interview with the Paris Review three years earlier Proulx was quoted as follows:
‘I think it’s important to leave spaces in a story for readers to fill in from their own experience, but unfortunately the audience that “Brokeback” reached most strongly have powerful fantasy lives. … [A] lot of men have decided that the story should have had a happy ending. They can’t bear the way it ends—they just can’t stand it. So they rewrite the story, including all kinds of boyfriends and new lovers and so forth after Jack is killed. And it just drives me wild. They can’t understand that the story isn’t about Jack and Ennis. It’s about homophobia; it’s about a social situation; it’s about a place and a particular mindset and morality. They just don’t get it. I can’t tell you how many of these things have been sent to me as though they’re expecting me to say, Oh great, if only I’d had the sense to write it that way. …’
These people – who, Proulx told the Wall Street Journal, are mostly men – ‘don’t get the message that if you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it’. That message – a repetition of what Ennis says to Jack at the motel – provides the closing words of her story. I find her insistence that Brokeback Mountain isn’t about Ennis and Jack, as distinct from ‘a social situation’, etc puzzling. These two ‘abouts’ aren’t mutually exclusive; besides, Jack and Ennis are strongly individualised. Ang Lee’s approach to the material imparts a sense of the story being ‘about’ Ennis and Jack. The charismatic actors playing them reinforce this approach and make the unhappy outcome all the more upsetting. Proulx claims that those who feel compelled to give her storytelling advice always preface it with ‘I’m not gay but …’ I’m not sure I believe her claim any more than she seems to believe the professions of straightness. In any case, it’s rather ironic that ‘a social situation … a particular mindset and morality’ are uppermost in the thoughts of both Proulx, according to what she said to Paris Review, and the men who write to her. She was concerned to set Ennis and Jack’s predicament in a particular place at a particular time. I’d guess that many of her correspondents are younger gay men who inhabit a culture in which, and whose own experience proves, you can ‘fix it’. (Perhaps, even now, relatively few of them are from Wyoming. Although gay marriage was legalised there in 2014, things can’t have changed all that much since 2009, when Proulx told Paris Review that people in Wyoming ‘won’t read it. A large section of the population is still outraged’.)
I saw Brokeback Mountain for the first time in early 2006 and hadn’t seen it again until this month at BFI. I don’t think I’ve changed my mind about its strengths and weaknesses. I’m not convinced by the opening. Ennis and Jack are waiting outside the foreman’s office on a patch of windswept, dusty waste land, deserted except for them and Jack’s jeep. It’s effective scene-setting – it gives a sense of the weather both actual and metaphorical – but the tension between the two young men’s silence and their significant looks is too obvious. It’s not only because we know what’s coming that both of them appear to be trying to conceal a guilty secret. That fits with Jack’s character, even if it doesn’t make dramatic sense for Ang Lee to convey it so early, but why does Ennis give out similar signals? He sees the world from under the brim of a hat that’s pulled down almost over his eyes. Of course this characteristic can indicate shyness rather than secretiveness (two elements of Ennis’s personality that are gradually fused in what follows). It still seems a mistake to emphasise it in the way that Lee and Heath Ledger do in this first sequence.
Anthony Lane, who wrote a fine review of Brokeback Mountain in the New Yorker, memorably described the ‘curious motion’ of its early stages, when it ‘manag[es] to seem at once hectic and sluggish’. I’ve also doubted, both times I’ve seen the film, whether Ennis and Jack have a sufficiently good time on Brokeback Mountain. The pleasure they find in each other’s company there – social as well as sexual – is presented in such a muted, fragmented way that the experience seems shadowed by the knowledge of what their lives will become in the longer term. The movie is significantly unhappier than the short story – the result of Ang Lee’s almost excessive discretion and the film’s removal of Proulx’s bookends to the main narrative. More sex scenes between Ennis and Jack in the film would mean more moments of pleasure for us to see them enjoying – and reinforce the difference between these moments and their usual ways of life. Proulx’s story begins with Ennis, as an older man, waking early in the morning in his trailer home, ‘suffused with a sense of pleasure because Jack Twist was in his dream’. Proulx’s postscript reprises and expands on Ennis’s bittersweet dreams:
‘And he would sometimes wake in grief, sometimes with the old sense of joy and release; the pillow sometimes wet, sometimes the sheets.’
After an hour of this second viewing, I was finding the film disappointing and beginning to think that I’d overrated it in my memory. This feeling changed as the character of Ennis imposed itself increasingly on the story and the years after the summer on Brokeback began to accumulate. Ang Lee’s realisation of the passage of time – and of how this weighs on the hearts of the two men – is one of this movie’s most notable achievements. There are some obvious indicators, like children growing up. There are cosmetic aids. Jake Gyllenhaal grows a moustache, his hair greys, he puts on a bit of weight (these changes in Jack’s appearance are all faithful to Proulx). Anne Hathaway, as Lureen, has hairdos that get bigger and fancier. But the dramatic power of time grinding on and narrowing down the possibilities for Ennis and Jack is thanks chiefly to the director’s fine narrative judgment. And whatever the make-up people did for Heath Ledger was exceptionally subtle. Ennis, who watches most of his life pass as if at a distance from it, ages and doesn’t age. At the end of the film, he’s still slim and his complexion hasn’t changed much yet Ledger manages to make him spiritually weary and defeated. His and Lee’s artistry produces a remarkable effect. There are scenes, especially in the early years of Ennis’s and Jack’s afterlives, which, as you watch them, are individually unsatisfying and verging on inert. In the retrospect that the last hour of the film encourages, these earlier scenes register, with increasing impact, as examples of wasted time. Brokeback Mountain conveys how much of the principals’ lives is boring and how time drags when you’re bored (though the movie never bores and rarely drags). Yet Lee and his editors, Geraldine Peroni and Dylan Tichenor, also convey a sense of future leaking rapidly away. (You could call this is a mixture of ‘hectic and sluggish’ of a more satisfying kind than Anthony Lane noted.)
It’s remarkable how, with the considerable help of the screenplay, Ang Lee and the cinematographer, Rodrigo Prieto, absorb and express the texture of Annie Proulx’s story. There are images on screen that almost perfectly replicate those of the prose – like the early ascent of the mountain:
‘Ennis and Jack, the dogs, horses and mules, a thousand ewes and their lambs flowed up the trail like dirty water through the timber and out above the tree line into the great flowery meadows and the coursing, endless wind.’
There are also images which, though invented by the film-makers, seem organically coherent with the original. A tetchy conversation between Ennis and Alma at the mini-mart where she works part-time culminates in a shelf of tins getting knocked over. The tinned food immediately brings to mind the provisions that Ennis and Jack lived on during the Brokeback summer – a well-judged resonance. In the final shot of the movie, the camera moves from the postcard and the two shirts to the window of Ennis’s trailer and a view of landscape from it. The window is narrow so the view is restricted. The land is predominantly, invitingly green; it’s also deserted, and far away. Gustavo Santaolalla’s score too is admirably sensitive. The main melody, which Lee uses sparingly, combines tenderness with an aching, burdensome quality.
Anthony Lane rightly describes Heath Ledger’s voice as ‘a mumble and a rumble … [Ennis] hopes that, by swallowing his words, he can swallow his feelings, too’. Audibility is, of course, in the ear of the listener but Ledger’s vocal skill is such that I can make out nearly all of what he says – and, at the same time, understand that Ennis is determined to keep schtum. In spite of my reservations about the opening sequence, Ledger does fine things in it. He beautifully expresses Ennis’s diffidence – as he hesitates on the steps to the trailer office when the foreman arrives, as he puts the remains of a cigarette back in his shirt pocket. After leaving Jack at the end of the herding, Ennis is so snarled up and desolate that he’s physically sick – sobbing and throwing up at the same time. Heath Ledger’s superlative physical acting in this sequence is repeated in the moment of Ennis’s breakdown – the climax to the ‘I wish I could quit you’ scene – in which the character’s anger and need are stunningly combined. Jake Gyllenhaal is very good as Jack but he’s not naturally ‘rough-mannered … rough-spoken’, his acting seems relatively conventional beside Ledger’s, and his aging is rather superficial. In a similar way, Anne Hathaway, though excellent as Lureen, doesn’t inhabit her character the way Michelle Williams does. Alma’s catching sight of Ennis and Jack locked together results in one of the most memorable things in Brokeback Mountain. Not only does Michelle Williams shrivel in that moment; in her subsequent scenes, she makes Alma’s depletion an enduring condition. A few of the bit players are a little too emphatic – Peter McRobbie and Roberta Maxwell as Jack’s parents, for example. But there are fine cameos too: Randy Quaid as the foreman; Kate Mara as Ennis’s grown-up elder daughter; Linda Cardellini as a woman who tries unavailingly to build a relationship with Ennis after his divorce from Alma.
Brokeback Mountain quickly acquired a prominence in popular cultural references that it’s never since lost. As early as February 2006, the Dick Cheney quail hunt incident[3] spawned a New Yorker cover mimicking the theatrical release poster for the film. Just a few weeks ago on the BBC’s Detectorists, the time spent together by the two main, male characters was described by the wife of one of them – with amusing inaccuracy – as being ‘like Brokeback Mountain’. The film also developed an ill-fated aura for extraneous reasons beyond the sadness of the story that it tells. This is a movie that has remained famous for not winning the Best Picture Oscar – a loss widely attributed to the Academy’s unease with the homosexual subject matter. (The film did win, as well as many other prizes, Academy Awards for Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Original Score.) A real tragedy – Heath Ledger’s death in 2008, at the age of twenty-eight – compounded its cachet as a movie pervaded by a sense of injustice. These irrational contributions to the film’s myth risk obscuring the truth of its status but shouldn’t be allowed to detract from it. Brokeback Mountain isn’t a great film but it has great things in it.
22 November 2015
[1] The ‘del’ of the short story is a ‘Del’ in the cast list of the film.
[2] From this point onwards, I’m quoting, unless I indicate otherwise, from the screenplay, as published online at http://screenplayexplorer.com/wp-content/scripts/brokeback_mountain.pdf, rather than from the short story – although Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana often use Annie Proulx’s words unchanged.
[3] The then Vice-President accidentally shot Harry Whittington, an elderly attorney, while both were participating in a quail hunt on a Texas ranch. Whittington suffered a minor heart attack but his injuries weren’t otherwise serious. According to Wikipedia, he’s still alive today.
