TNMC

Ang Lee's earlier movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is startling similar in theme to his latest film, Brokeback Mountain. Both movies deal with two people who are deeply in love but unable, for reasons of societal pressure, to fully engage in an open loving relationship.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was set in ancient China and featured spectacular martial arts and near magical sequences. The pair in question could not be together because she was once married and is expected to mourn her late husband forever. Brokeback Mountain is set in Wyoming in 1963 and features two young cowboys who fall in love with each other. Not living in a time and place noted for having an open mind or a forgiving nature, the two keep their love a secret and try to go about a more socially acceptable life.

The two men, Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), meet up when both show up looking for work as cowboys. Joe Aguirre (Randy Quaid) hires the pair to watch over a herd of sheep that he wants grazing on Brokeback Mountain for the summer. Aguirre lost a lot of sheep the previous summer and is willing to break work regulations to prevent it happening again. That means that one of them must spend nights with the herd, while the other maintains a base camp. Jack sleeps with the herd for the early going, a task he grumbles about constantly. The two get along pretty well, despite Ennis' definite aversion to talking. They eventually switch tasks, to help their sanity. One particular evening, after way too much to drink, Ennis opts to sleep at the camp by the fire rather than head out to the herd. The fire eventually goes out and he is freezing in the open, until Jack demands he come into the tent. Before the evening is over, the two men engage in a rather spontaneous and very rough bout of sex. Come morning, neither one is in much of a mood to talk about it.

Returning to civilization, the two go their separate ways. Jack heads to Texas where he works as a rodeo rider. Ennis marries his girlfriend Alma (Michelle Williams) and they quickly start a family, having two girls. They seem to be settling into fairly normal lives, although little echoes of their secret keep popping up. Eventually Jack looks up Ennis and it is quickly apparent that what happened on the mountain was not a one time thing. These two are deeply and passionately in love with each other. The rest of their lives would be an attempt to balance sporadic “fishing” trips to Brokeback Mountain with attempting to lead normal lives separately. Jack meets a woman rodeo rider Lureen (Anne Hathaway) and they are soon married with a young boy. He works for his father-in-law, selling farm equipment. Ennis stays in the cowboy life.

In a lot of ways, Ennis is the very typical American male. He devotes himself to his work, both as the way to make himself valuable to his family but also as a way of maintaining some distance from them. He is not a man comfortable in expressing his feelings to anyone. It's clear as they grow up that his daughters adore him but they never really get a chance to know him. He never lets them have that opportunity. Even Jack, to whom Ennis far more open than most, still finds himself surprised by what is going on in Ennis' head over the years. Ledger turns in a masterfully subtle performance here, grabbing the physical habits of cowboy and wielding them like weapons to build his character. His entire body language is very closed off, the way he always hunches in a bit and jams his hands in his pockets whenever possible. He speaks in a constant mumble, never moving his upper lip. It gives the impression of a man with a wad of chewing tobacco permanently stuck in his lip but the indistinct diction it gives him just adds to his emotional distance.

Jack is very different. He is much more open and seems to enjoy the spotlight. Sexually he is the far more adventurous of the two. Jack doesn't seem as concerned with a social backlash as Ennis and tends to resent him a bit for an unwillingness to take a chance on a life together. Gyllenhaal plays him as someone with no real moral compass. He will fly in the face of societal standards if it makes him happy but he's just as likely to play it perfectly straight if that pleases him. The older Jack gets the less he seems to care about what the rest of the world thinks, in direct opposition to Ennis, who is terrified of it.

The movie plays out as a very conventional love story in a lot of ways. But the secret nature of Jack and Ennis' relationship gives rise to a constant thread of paranoia. It is impossible to look at anyone in the film and not wonder if they know or suspect what is going on. Brilliantly, the script very rarely vocalizes this, preferring to let it come out in the actors' performances. Ennis talks about a pair of old cowboys he knew about when he was a little boy, one of whom was savagely murdered. Not once does he ever say that they were a gay couple, merely implying it. What isn't implied is the penalty they incurred for the way they chose to live their lives. Ennis' father forced him to look at the corpse of one of the men, making it very clear what was acceptable. That flashback is what gives that sense of paranoia a real edge. The danger is very much real. Doing what Jack wants, to live in some hidden corner of the world together, carries a likely death sentence. His reasons for resisting his desire to be with Jack has a very valid foundation.

This is a gorgeous film. The scenery is absolutely spectacular, photographed to soak every little bit of the natural beauty that surrounds the story. The early scenes on the mountain could work entirely on the basis of the imagery, never mind the human actors trying to convey a story.

Last year's best picture winner, Million Dollar Baby was often cited for how simply and effectively it told its story, letting the actors do the heavy emotional lifting. Brokeback Mountain takes a very similar approach. The script is fairly bare of dialog, leaving the actors to do the heavy lifting and sell the story almost entirely on their interactions. Director Ang Lee was smart enough to step back and let them do just that. It may not be going out on a limb to suggest this movie has a similar arc through the awards season, right down to the inane chatter of pundits trying to make a name for themselves. It's sad to imagine someone trying to bolster their political aims by trashing an artistic endeavor but at the same time it probably speaks volumes about the effectiveness of the movie that it becomes such a tempting target.

- John Shea