REVIEWED - BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN: Brokeback Mountain is a haunting, humanistic tale of forbidden love among taciturn Marlboro Men, writes Michael Dwyer
IN THE tradition of the great film-makers of the 1940s and '50s, Ang Lee is a truly versatile director who moves between genres with apparent ease and unostentatious skill in movies as diverse as Eat Drink Man Woman, Sense and Sensibility, The Ice Storm, Ride with the Devil and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
Lee's breakthrough came in 1993 with The Wedding Banquet, in which a young Chinese immigrant to the US arranges a marriage of convenience to a young woman who needs a green card. He has to "de-gay" his apartment when his parents, who are unaware of his true sexuality, announce that they are travelling from Taiwan for the wedding.
While that engaging film was shaped primarily as a comedy, it was marked by the humanity and perceptiveness that run through Lee's body of work. He returns to a gay theme, this time eschewing humour as he depicts the passionate, deeply emotional relationship formed between two cowboys in the captivating Brokeback Mountain, adapted by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana from, and expanding on, a short story by Annie Proulx.
Brokeback Mountain opens in 1963, in the dusty small town of Signal, Wyoming. Here a taciturn ranch hand, Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger), and outgoing rodeo rider Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) are hired for the summer to herd hundreds of sheep up on Brokeback Mountain. On one particularly cold night, they share a tent and their passion is released in abrupt, functional sex.
"You know I ain't queer," Ennis says the next morning, to which Jack replies, "Me neither". But they become even more intimate that night, and for days and nights afterwards, until summer and their jobs come to an end and they are parted. Both men marry and have children, leading separate lives for years until one of them finally takes the initiative and their sexual relationship resumes with greater intensity.
It is more complicated now, and they live in rigidly conservative communities. They are only a few hours away by plane from the Summer of Love celebrations on the west coast and the gay rights-driven Stonewall riots in the east, but they might as well be on another planet.
With characteristic sensitivity, Lee acutely observes their dilemma - torn between passionate love for each other and the guilt and fear it provokes in them, and troubled by the prejudice and repression with which they are faced. The film is also affecting as it catches the aching confusion that engulfs their wives, empathically played by Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway.
This tender, thoughtfully composed love story is rooted in a universality that addresses forbidden relationships far beyond the movie's specifically gay theme, and it is treated with honesty, conviction and compassion. The natural rapport between the two leads is palpable, and, while Gyllenhaal demonstrates a range and depth untapped in his earlier movies, Ledger's intense, smouldering performance is, quite simply, revelatory.
Set against striking landscapes handsomely framed by Rodrigo Prieto, and accompanied by a haunting, beautifully melancholy score from Gustavo Santaolalla, this outstanding film reflects with simmering power on the unstoppable force that is true love, and it is riveting as it proceeds at a subtly measured pace to a conclusion that is wrenching and deeply moving.
