Come Anticipate "Brokeback Mountain" With Me

The movie has been discussed so much that we've almost overlooked what it does superlatively well, of which that first scene is a fine example. It's pretty clear that Jack is cruising Ennis; what's remarkable is that Lee lets the scene play. It's been a long time since a mainstream film eschewed dialogue for cinematography, body language, and the sheer gorgeousness of the actors.

another thing about the first half of the movie is that it doesn't communicate any overhelming passion or joy or even, apart from a brief scene witnessed by the boss, any fun between the men so that you are, to an extent, left wondering why the romance kicks off in the first place and why ennis, in particular, is so keen to revisit it 4 years later.

During their idyll on Brokeback Mountain there are hints. Ennis gets upset when Aguirre calls them back a few weeks early. Their goodbye is very well acted: watch how Gyllenhaal tries to stay non-chalant and fails miserably.

Jack, the one most likely to live on Castro Street, seeks him out on a hunch. His moneyed married life was going nowhere; he takes a chance and sends a postcard to the last guy with whom he had any fun (it's clear he's interested in other men besides Ennis), with no hope that Ennis will respond.

(not a bad thing!!)

Nah, of all that genres that live on, I'm most ready to bury this one.

Sarah Schulman from Slate's year-in-culture summary:

Brokeback opened the door to a far more complex look at how homophobia destroys people's lives, the consequences of cruelty on gay people's emotional stability, and how familial homophobia is the place where much of this is enforced. Where the movie fell short was in the acknowledgement of gay subculture and rebellion. It seems unlikely to me that Jack Twist would have missed the existence of the gay revolution. All he had to do was turn on the television or go to church to hear about Anita Bryant and Gay Liberation in Dade County, or stumble onto the Gay Rodeo circuit, or go to a dentist's office to see Leonard Matlovich on the cover of Time magazine.

http://www.slate.com/id/2133842

Of course he didn't. Check out his sideburns and 'stache!

said the music jarred a little in places tho; which I didn't notice

"Ennis, girls don't fall in love with fun"

"I wish I knew how to quit you" was a little wishy-washier and whatever heath was saying, around that time, too, wasn't great but oh well

totally

There were problems - neither wife had enough screentime to be either really good or really bad (though MW's eyes/reaction shots when she first sees Jack and Ennis were fantastic), and that same guitar line that played whenever they were together got annoying fast, but the strings that blended into white noise at other times were a nice touch.

In a way, I guess all the stuff upthread about it catering to hetero audiences and not being all that radical in its depiction of homosexuality, etc. is right, but I think that's because the gayness (as promoted) was a red herring. I saw a movie about longing and repression and being stuck in the same damn place your entire life, unable to save yourself or make a better life.

The last shot: after Ennis buttons up Jack's shirt he looks at a postcard of Brokeback Mountain, mumbling "Jack, I swear..." then the camera pans away to the open window.

It is devastating. He's still keeping the love of his life in the closet.

Last night's Tonight Show appearance by Heath Ledger was fairly remarkable, because Ledger and Leno managed to talk for a solid 15 minutes, much of it about Ang Lee and Brokeback, and never mention the word gay or anything approximating it.

Ledger: "I just looked at it as an incredible opportunity to play this, you know...complex, lonely figure..."

The omission seemed fairly obvious to me...

http://towleroad.typepad.com/towleroad/2006/01/talk_about_brok.html

crosspost

nick and I were sure we recognised her from something else but imdb says she hasn't been in anything I'd have seen

See Havoc, in which she plays a brazen teenage strumpet.

the movie goes for a solid two hours without mentioning the word gay!

S1ocki:

"You know I ain't no queer."
"Me neither."

When Jack's mother helps Ennis put Jack's shirt in the bag, does she put Jack's slip Jack's ashes in there too? I know there was a moment between Ennis and Jack's mom, but I didn't quite see / don't remember what exactly happened.

If so, perhaps Ennis in the last scene is swearing he will scatter Jack's ashes on Brokeback... even though it may be a while, what with his daughter wedding and his history of letting jack down, etc.? I dunno.

But Jay and Heath didn't even mention "stemmin the rose"! (and presumably they're not closeted 1960s sheep herders)

Compare his interview to Gyllenhaal's last week, in which the gay stuff was NOT ignored and Gyllenhaal was as open and coltish as Jack Twist. Maybe cuz he's more at ease in the spotlight.

If so, perhaps Ennis in the last scene is swearing he will scatter Jack's ashes on Brokeback... even though it may be a while, what with his daughter wedding and his history of letting jack down, etc.? I dunno.

Nope. It's ambiguous. Again, the story (and I paraphrase): Ennis mumbles, "Jack, I swear" even though Ennis is not the swearing kind and Jack had never asked him to swear anything.

you're being sarcastic, right? those huge, close-up shots of his face on the big screen... holy god damn i'll break his somethin'

I saw a minute or two of the Ledger interview - I think he was still in-character from the junkie movie he's doing. What little I saw consisted of him refusing to make eye contact with Leno.

-- jaymc (jmcunnin...), January 18th, 2006. (tracklink)

duh... thanks a lot, though, that's the hottest thread ever

http://boxofficemojo.com/daily

"hetero-pandering" is such a cynical phrase.

Was dragged to see this for a second time with a straight friend swayed by the publicity. A lot of my objections now seem trivial. I'm more impressed now by Heath Ledger's great physical performance; so few actors these days know how to move in character. By the time Jack Twist delivers his excoriating final monologue Ennis has for all intents and purposes shriveled, a smoking and drinking waste of a man. All those scenes of Ennis hunched over at a bar are quietly and insistently convincing.

The Thanksgiving scenes - in which Jack and Ennis try to convince the audience that they're Real Men besides being fags - are the only hetero-pandering moments.

And the score is wonderful.

The Director's Fingerprints by Joe Morgenstern

since you have to be a subscriber to read the article on internet, I copy and paste the key points:

Pinning down who did exactly what can be hard even for someone who's been an intimate part of the process. "Ang Lee has a way of letting the film unfold itself," says Sydney Pollack, a top-flight director in his own right who was the executive producer of "Sense and Sensibility." "He's like a Zen presence on the set. He has a way of tapping the energy that already exists in writers and actors and other people working for him, of perfectly mixing it so that he doesn't ever appear to have his hands all over it. Yet every movie he's ever done bears his stamp quite clearly."

All of which goes back to the original question: How do we as spectators see that stamp? Where do we find the direction? Clues vary from film to film, but, as a case in point, I've picked a few from Ang Lee's most recent film, "Brokeback Mountain." They're nothing more than clues, since I'm a spectator too -- I wasn't on the set to watch him work -- but they may give some sense of the director's sensibility.

The opening shot bespeaks both immensity and simplicity -- a far-off trailer truck, announced by two notes on a guitar, traversing a vast mountain landscape at night.

The early sequences -- the two cowboys, Jack and Ennis, moving sheep through the mountains -- are photographed lyrically, but again the shots are strikingly simple. When the men speak haltingly of themselves, their scenes are paced somewhere between leisurely and slow. At first I found the pace trying, then came to recognize it as a sign of the director's trust in his audience's willingness to stay with the story as it unfolds.

Heath Ledger's Ennis -- hooded, laconic, recessive -- is a radical departure from the actor's previous work. Does that mean the decisive influence was directorial? Not necessarily, but at a minimum the director was hospitable to his co-star's performance.

The first leaps in time -- suddenly Ennis is married, and then, just as suddenly, the father of two children -- are so abrupt as to make you wonder if the projectionist switched the reels. But they're evidence of the director's daring; time will not be wasted on tidy transitions.

The film looks spare throughout -- plain buildings and plain rooms to go with the plainspoken protagonists. That's the province of the production designer, to be sure, but the consistency of style, both physical and visual, suggests a strong directorial influence as well.

There's enormous power in the long, almost silent passage when, and after, Ennis's wife discovers her husband in a passionate embrace with Jack. Michelle Williams created the performance, but Ang Lee -- and his editor -- constructed the sequence in a clear-eyed way that shows the actress's work to stunning advantage.

A phone call, near the end, brings Ennis important news about Jack from Jack's wife, Lureen. (I'm avoiding specifics for those who haven't yet seen the film.) Another director might have played most of the scene on Ennis's face, since the news affects him most directly. Ang Lee chose to give much greater prominence to Lureen, who, thanks to Anne Hathaway's acting, tells an enthralling tale beneath the camera's steady gaze.

These discrete, somewhat abstract observations can't begin to convey the totality of the film. Taken together, though, they reflect some of the qualities that inform the film -- physical beauty, clarity, confident pace, firm though delicate control. If there's a single word for what connects these various qualities, it's direction.