"Brokeback Mountain" is one of the best films I've seen in a long time. It's based on a prize-winning short story by Annie Proulx (which you can read in its fairly brief entirety by clicking here). In very economical writing, the story says as much by what it doesn't say as by what it does; it is a tale of love repressed, and the writing gains strength through appropriately similar repressions, as does Heath Ledger's remarkable performance in the film version. As I watched the movie and read the story, I kept thinking of it as a ballad brought down to date.


The story and film explore the complexity of forbidden relationships. In an earlier time, ballads were written exploring similar themes--ballads like "Mill o' Tifty's Annie" or "Annachie Gordon." Those old Scottish ballads dealt with love thwarted because of social class or economically required marriages. In today's society, such reasons for prohibiting relationship are quaintly outdated, and even prohibitions of marriage due to ethnic or racial differences seem passe. The issue of sexual orientation is the frontier of relationship prohibition that resonates in today's society, so that's the place where this modern tragic ballad is set. Just as Mill o' Tifty's Annie's brother breaks her back for "liking" Andrew Lammie, so the couple in Brokeback Mountain needs to worry constantly about the possibility of being gay-bashed to death. As the character Ennis DelMar observes: "You and me can't hardly be decent together if what happened back there . . . grabs on us like that. We do that in the wrong place we'll be dead. " In fact, one year after Annie Proulx's story was published in The New Yorker, University of Wyoming college student Matthew Shephard was beaten to death for being gay and left crucified on a ranch fence about 30 miles from Ms. Proulx's home. She was part of the jury pool called for his murder (although she did not actually serve).


There are stylistic resonances with ballads, too. Much of the story is told through compression into episodes, including dialogue from characters who do not understand the wholeness of the situation. The dialect is Wyoming Ranch-hand rather than Broad Scots--"There's no reins on this one. It scares the piss out a me." Ms. Proulx is careful to have her characters speak in realistic terms, given who they are, and the screenplay by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana carefully preserves much of the language of the original short story.


The "gay cowboy" moniker used to describe the movie probably derives from the South Park line a couple of years ago where Cartman, one of the South Park kids, asks if independent films are all about "gay cowboys eating pudding." The main protagonists in "Brokeback Mountain" are actually sheepherders, not cowboys, and we can have a nuanced discussion about whether they truly qualify as "gay" once you've seen the movie or read the story. BTW, there's no pudding in "Brokeback Mountain" either.


Heath Ledger's performance is the best acting I've seen, perhaps, since Meryl Streep in "Sophie's Choice." He manages to convey the full complexity of a very repressed character with understatements and silences.


A must-see film, unless you're too homophobic to deal with the subject matter.



--Charlie Baum





I've copied this posting (and further edited it) from its original location in another Mudcat BS thread which degenerated into homophobic sniping and arguments over the behaviors of certain rude regular posters. I hope that this thread can generate serious discussion; frivolous remarks belong in the other thread.