Brokeback Mountain (2005): The One That Broke Through

The Story

Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) meet in 1963 in Wyoming, hired to tend sheep on Brokeback Mountain for a summer. What happens between them on the mountain is left almost completely unspoken, both in the film and between the characters. It happens. They come down from the mountain. They part. They marry women, have children, try to live the lives they were supposed to live.

They cannot. They meet again, sporadically, over twenty years — fishing trips, Ennis tells his wife, though there is no fishing. And then one of them is dead, and the other is standing in a trailer in Wyoming holding a shirt.

The shirt. Everybody knows about the shirt. If you've seen the film, you know why it matters. If you haven't, nothing that can be said here will prepare you adequately.

Heath Ledger

Ledger died in 2008, three years after the film's release, at twenty-eight. He was extraordinary in several films. He was extraordinary here in a way that is different in kind: this is a performance that required him to locate and sustain, for the entire length of a film, an emotional state — the specific grief of a man who will not allow himself to be what he is — that most actors never come within reach of.

Ennis speaks in half-sentences. He holds everything inward. His body, in Ledger's performance, is a site of suppression — the desire physically contained, forced down, expressed only in the brief, desperate times when it escapes. The performance is almost entirely non-verbal, almost entirely physical, and it is flawless.

Gyllenhaal, who gets to be the more expressive, more open character, is very good. Ledger is something else.

Ang Lee's Direction

Lee shoots Wyoming and the mountain sequences in a widescreen grandeur that gives the landscape its own emotional weight. The mountains are genuinely beautiful; the beauty of the place the men cannot have is inseparable from the beauty of the life they cannot have. This is not accidental.

Inside the domestic sequences — the houses, the marriages, the cramped lives Ennis and Jack have built around their real lives — the cinematography contracts. The rooms are smaller. The light is flatter. The world is reduced.

The contrast is the film's sustained argument: look at what they were, and look at what they have instead.

The Grief

Brokeback Mountain is not, primarily, a love story. It is a story about what happens to love when it is not permitted to exist — the distortion it produces, the damage it does, the lives that are diminished not just by its absence but by the effort of its suppression.

Ennis and Jack do not have a relationship. They have twenty years of brief, desperate reunions surrounded by the silence of two men who cannot say what they are to each other. The grief of the film is not the grief of loss. It is the grief of waste: what these men might have been if the world had permitted it, what they were to each other in the absence of permission, the cost of living a life that is not your life.

The Cultural Moment

The film arrived at a moment when same-sex marriage was becoming a political reality in parts of the United States, when the question of what gay men's lives could look like was genuinely open in a way it had not been before. It did not arrive as a polemic. It arrived as a Wyoming rancher in a hat, barely speaking, holding a shirt in a trailer.

The combination — the emotional directness, the mainstream setting, the complete avoidance of urban gay culture — reached audiences that previous gay cinema had not. People who would not have gone to see a film about gay men in New York went to see a film about ranch hands in Wyoming and came out changed.

BoysDo is for the viewer who understands that gay desire is serious, is real, is worth the full resources of great filmmaking. *Brokeback Mountain* made that argument to the largest audience in the history of gay cinema. It made it beautifully, and at a cost — the shirt, the ending, the waste of it — that ensures no one who sees it forgets.

Some films change what is possible to say. This is one of them.