The popular conception of sexuality in America has doubtless expanded since the turn of the century, but its depiction on mainstream screens somehow has not. How many great queer dramas have we had since the year 2000? Carol, Moonlight, and Milk, certainly. A Quiet Passion and Pariah, too, although those didn’t exactly light up the zeitgeist. Any way you slice it, you can count the number of memorable movies about the queer experience in America on two hands — if you aren’t using them to hold your head in shame at the prospect of how few there are. But what makes a great queer drama? What separates the wheat of something like Ang Lee’s monumental Brokeback Mountain from the forgettable chaff?
A great eye doesn’t hurt. Take one look at the twisting, billowy clouds at the beginning of Brokeback Mountain and Thomas Hart Benton immediately comes to mind. Lee, no stranger to the American landscape by 2005, emboldens the queer experience by juxtaposing the deeply felt, impossible love between two quintessential American figures — cowboys — against landscapes indicative of the quintessential American painter. Brokeback Mountain takes us to another time, and another place, to remind us of the experience we’ve all had: a single, joyous, precious moment we find once a lifetime that stays with us and gives us the energy to push through the rest of it. By asserting this specific universality with which its characters’ struggle, Brokeback Mountain in turn reminds us of their particular humanity. If Benton is a quintessentially American artist, and if the cowboy is a quintessentially American figure, then isn’t the queer man as American as all of them?
Lee takes us into the hearts of Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) by blocking and framing them like the mythic men in classic American westerns — at least initially. There’s a lot of Ford’s Monument Valley in Brokeback Mountain, and a little of Tourneur’s community-oriented westerns, too. From the outset, Lee gives us a sense of how these men view themselves, and how they might see themselves on screen in Wyoming during the middle of the 20th century. They’re introduced as larger-than-life, standing in solitude with heads down and shadows cloaking the eyes under their hats. If one didn’t know what the movie was about, one might expect them to draw pistols on each other as they wait for the assignment that would change their lives. But once the boys get to Brokeback, and it does not take long, so much care is taken to show that these are tender men, not myths. On their way up, Jack is seen holding a sheep on his back, while Ennis carries a lamb inside the pack hitched to his horse. In this way, Lee demythologizes the American west by showing us the holy relationship between man and nature, and by stopping to luxuriate in the sound of the mountains. It’s not the hard exhalation of wind blowing; it’s simply air, calmly suspended, letting us know it’s there.
With camp set up on either end of the mountain on their first night, Jack looks down at Ennis’ campfire from above. Lee cuts on the anticipatory strum of a guitar to two mountains basking in dawn’s light. These men are meant to be together. The mountain here is to Lee what the river is to Twain: a manifestation of the spiritual connection human beings have with nature, and with each other. Mankind, when given the space, is in tune with his own essential nature, and with nature itself. Slowly, Jack and Ennis open up to that essential nature, and their intimacy emerges organically: they’ve been alone on this mountain for weeks, and Ennis has to get clean. He undresses, out of focus, while Jack peels a potato in the foreground. The latter smokes a cigarette, lips twitching, and it’s easy to see he’s willing, begging, his eyes not to flit over to Ennis. But the force drawing them together is too strong.
One night, they get drunk together on the same side of the mountain. It’s too late for Ennis to return to his side, so he crashes with Jack. In sleep — in dreams — they hold hands. They wake up to the reality that they’re queer men in a society that rejects homosexuality, but there is no society around them, only loving nature. Jack makes the first move, pulling Ennis close. They knock their foreheads together like rams and pull at the skin of each other’s faces, removing the mask of heteronormativity. Jack undoes his pants. Ennis throws Jack down and undoes his own. The sex is quick, bound up in darkness and confusion and even a little frustration. Lee gets close, panning and tilting around the boys as they figure out how they’re going to do what they’re going to do: make love. It’s a startlingly rich scene, accomplished in a single shot in order to capture the free flow of feelings and bodies in motion. Ennis wakes up the next morning, puts his pants back on, and stoically loads his rifle outside. Back to the way things were.
Jack and Ennis proceed to share a beautiful summer together, but eventually they have to go down. In the sequence wherein they return to wider society, Lee demonstrates his extraordinary capacity to juggle tone. Ennis, the more introverted of the two, is visibly mournful. Jack wraps him in a lasso. “Time to go home, cowboy,” he says. He trips Ennis, they wrestle, laughing, but this amiable roughhousing quickly transmogrifies into an actual fight. Ennis bleeds on his shirt, and Lee switches to handheld. No proper closure exists for this relationship, so they resort to a physical violence not unlike that which would be inflicted upon them if anyone found out. Ennis forgets his shirt.
Brokeback Mountain is almost perfectly bifurcated between its tender, Emersonian first act and the lives it traces in the aftermath. The film is no less beautiful from this point, but it finds its beauty in different pockets of experience. Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana’s screenplay takes center stage: in the rough-hewn poetry of their dialogue, and in the depth of curiosity they share toward Wyomingans. It explores class and repression with grace, but time, and its inexorable passing, is of chief concern in Brokeback Mountain.
To this end, there are dozens of gasp-worthy cuts between electrically-charged moments here, bridging gaps in time: Ennis stopping to wretch and sob after Jack departs from their initial meeting place in Signal, Wyoming, for example. Part of him grieves the loss of this singular love, and part of him rebels against that grief. Lee cuts hard to the next scene, in which Ennis is marrying Alma, his new wife. A few scenes later, Ennis has perfunctory sex with her — that is, until he turns off the light and flips her onto her stomach. Lee then gives us another hard cut to Jack riding a bull at the rodeo, where he meets his wife-to-be, Lureen. In this manner, the whole movie becomes a series of carefully interwoven expansions and contractions of time, and it’s all performed diegetically. When Ennis divorces Alma, the judge grants it: “On this day in 1974.” When Jack flips out at his bullish father-in-law at Thanksgiving dinner, it occurs against a soundbite about the “best defensive lineman in 1977.”
Music, too, comes to play a central role in charting the course of these men’s lives. In one later scene, Ennis takes his teenage daughter, Alma Jr., out to meet Cassie, his new girlfriend. “You’re good enough,” Junior mumbles, and as soon as she does, the soaring melancholy chords of the Allman Brothers’ “Melissa” begin. Cassie insists Ennis dance with her, and we adopt a near POV of Junior watching them. “Knowing many loving none,” Gregg Allman croons. “Bearing sorrow having fun.” In this we find a perfect encapsulation of Ennis’ lifelong struggle with his identity and his true love: Jack is his Melissa.
Ennis and Jack continue to meet throughout the years, although the meetings eventually grow sour. The last time we see them together, there’s an almost palpable autumnal chill. They look older, their eyes are wrinkled. Jack stands atop the crest of a small hill, Ennis framed small behind his right shoulder in the middle distance, the focus on Ennis. Lee then tracks the camera around Jack, racking focus to him. “There ain’t never enough time,” Jack whispers. “Never enough.” This marks the major turning point in their relationship. Jack is fixed in focus because he has realized enough is enough. Ennis has withheld a full commitment to the relationship for 20 years, and finally Jack is free to say what he needs. They get into an incendiary fight, one which ends with another brief bout of wrestling and an ocean of tears. It’s the last time they will see each other.
Top-shelf, truly legendary performances anchor Brokeback Mountain. Ledger plays Ennis like a closed fist around a stick of dynamite: tense and terse, but belying an essential sensitivity. Gyllenhaal’s Jack, however, is an open hand — he’s a born performer, and the actor plays him with bright eyes and big ambitions all the way to Jack’s untimely death. And it’s here, when Ennis travels to the Twist farm to try and carry out Jack’s final wish of having his ashes buried on Brokeback Mountain, where the production design communicates this death. But not the heavenly kind — it’s purgatorial. The walls are blank and barren, and in this scene we get the clearest sense of Jack as a romantic and as an idealist by adopting Ennis’ POV. He looks across Jack’s room, and it’s hopeless. Empty. Just a steel frame bed, a nondescript desk, and a small toy. A picture on the wall of a ranch hand is the only splash of color to be found: it’s no wonder that Jack was a romantic, possessing nothing as he did but his imagination. Ennis explores the room, peeks at some of Jack’s childhood clothes, realizing how much of himself Jack really hid. Ennis finds the shirt he thought he forgot at Brokeback. He holds it, caresses it, softly sways back and forth as if dancing with a ghost. But in truth, he’s dancing with a younger, purer version of himself as much as he is with any vision of Jack.
Brokeback Mountain’s greatest pull, and what makes it so compulsively watchable considering its meditative pace, is its understanding of how the joy of one moment can reverberate throughout the years and how nothing — not fatherhood, not fireworks, not even the ability to return to each other’s arms again — can live up to it. We watch these men grow up and apart, and away from their true nature. They desire to be taken back to that place and time in their lives, but they can’t. Nobody can. We can only move forward. So, Ennis keeps the shirt, along with a picture of Brokeback, to remind him of that time and place. And in the movie’s final shot, Ennis closes the closet holding these objects and walks away. We’re given half a frame of this closet, as light from the small window nearby shines on it. Our eye is drawn to the dirt road outside, then to the wheat waving in the breeze, and finally to the sun as it touches a field and a wide, cloudless sky holding it. But there is no mythology here as in the works of Thomas Hart Benton or John Ford, who at the end of The Searchers featured a similar portal. There’s only what’s out there. Just nature. Just life.
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