Come Anticipate "Brokeback Mountain" With Me

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.

(He's since apologized, but here's an excerpt of his original review:

The sheep do nothing special as they bleet around the bush, but Jack and Ennis do do something special. They have sex. Jack, who strikes me as a sexual predator, tracks Ennis down and coaxes him into sporadic trysts. But sporadic isn’t frequent enough for Jack. He wants Ennis full time! He whines, he pleads, he shouts that when they’re apart, he’s desolated. Jack can’t absorb Ennis’ implied response: better desolate than never! Heath Ledger’s performance under Ang Lee’s direction is outstanding, and Brokeback does have a few dramatic peaks. But this may be because its unconventional theme is outside the buns, it is being wildly overpraised. Not by me!)

http://towleroad.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/marlboro_towleroad_1.jpg

Ang Lee continues to astonish. In 1995, when his best-known film was Eat Drink Man Woman, set in his native Taiwan, the producers of Sense and Sensibility tapped him to direct their picture: an act of perception, of courage, for which all of us owe them thanks. Lee proceeded--incredibly--to make the best of the Jane Austen films. He then went on to make five more pictures, among which were two ultra-American ones, The Ice Storm, about Connecticut suburbanites, and Ride With the Devil, about the Civil War.

Both of those films, whatever their other qualities, were made with societal comprehension. The fact that Lee was educated in theater and film at American universities must of course have much to do with his American ease. Now he shows it again in Brokeback Mountain, which deals with the American West in the twentieth century, and now we owe even more thanks to the producers who launched him on his unique career. (One of those producers worked on this new picture.)

The screenplay by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, based on a story by Annie Proulx, is about two cowboys who are lovers. In 1963 in Wyoming, two ranch hands named Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist are hired to spend the winter tending a thousand sheep up on Brokeback Mountain. (Shepherds though they are, through much of the film they call each other "cowboy," and we do see them later with cattle.) Ennis and Jack had not known each other previously, and they don't spend a lot of time together now. Ennis sleeps somewhere off near the sheep, and Jack bunks in a pup tent. One inclement night, however, they share the tent. There has not been the slightest hint of physical attraction between them, nor is there now as they bed down together. During the night, however, they find themselves--the phrase is apt--having sex.

In the morning they are their customary laconic selves as they go about their jobs, but they are both marked for life--by love. They have sex together again up in the mountains. Later on, through the years, they continue to meet as often as they can, even though in time both of them marry. The film traces their torment when separated, their happiness at reunions, and their near-pride in their private selves. Their marriages are not blissful--Ennis's wife indeed has seen the two men kissing--but they seem to accept marital trouble as part of the world's harassment of their truth.

The delicacy and pain and almost unbearable joy of the pair, though given to us through the actors, began with Lee, I believe--his vision of Ennis and Jack. He apparently sees their relationship as double. One part is the basic human lot, their immersion in a general current of emotional need that seems to flood around all men and women, that looks for reification, for person and place, in one or another sort of gender relationship. The second part is more specific: the morning after their first experience, Ennis and Jack virtually decide that they must be in love. They specify to each other that they are not "queer," but the condition that allows them to be themselves without shame is to believe that they are in love. This is a matter far from fakery. They are as truly in love as two people can be, but they are grateful for it because this spiritual union licenses them to continue their occasional beddings, and helps to justify each man to himself.

Their story does not finish as they might have wished: it couldn't, given the world in which they live. But their relationship from beginning to end has a finespun texture that is, I'd guess, the result of Lee's vision. His treatment of their love is so affirmed yet gentle that it seems, more than the story, the purpose for which he made the film.

The landscape in which most of it takes place is majestic, thrilling. It was actually shot in the Canadian Rockies, and the cinematographer, Rodrigo Prieto, presents the scenic marvels to us like resplendent gifts. The interweaving of the grand landscape with the intimate story has a peculiar synesthetic effect: it almost transmutes into music, Beethoven perhaps, in which great chords shape the cosmos through which a poignant lyrical theme winds.

Brokeback Mountain does not contain the slightest suggestion that its purpose is to chronicle a case or a social problem. (It has provoked a blizzard of articles on the subject of cowboy homosexuality, most of them paying little attention to the film's art.) It simply treasures two human beings who, unlikely as we may have thought it for these men, find themselves fixed in a discomfiting yet thorough passion. They inhabit a world that vaunts macho masculinity; nonetheless they seem secretly fortified by their fate.

The two leading actors are superb. Merely to remember their performances is to be moved again. Ennis is played by Heath Ledger, an Australian who has mastered western accent and bearing. He gives Ennis a solidity through which his new experience shivers like a crack through a rock. (An extrinsic fact to whet appetite: Ledger has just appeared in a film as Casanova.) It seems possible that, even allowing for the messiness of almost any acting career, Ledger may be on his way to the heights. Jack is Jake Gyllenhaal, who, in an odd way, has been slipping quietly into prominence. His performances in Proof and Jarhead hardly went unnoticed, but his Jack makes us realize that we have been watching the emergence of something more than a usable young leading man. As Jack, he creates a dogged sensitivity, a man who has not lived by emotional finesse but now finds himself capable of it and will not relinquish it.

Lee's part in these performances? In the diary that Emma Thompson kept while making Sense and Sensibility, she wrote: "I am constantly astounded by Ang--his taste is consummate. It sometimes takes a while to work out exactly what he wants but it's always something subtler." It seems highly likely that Ledger and Gyllenhaal could say the same.

So in all the tumult about this film, the eruption of its subject into wide attention and the consequent revelations about cowboys' lives in the past, let us--without forgetting the American sources of the screenplay--acknowledge the anomaly that the director is Chinese. Where his mind and imagination will take Lee next I do not yet know, but I certainly want to follow.

Hello, jeans in the 60s were butt-tight!

Go to your local vintage store and try on a pair of 60s jeans if you don't believe me.

Holy shit, SOMEONE ELSE HAS SEEN IT.

The movie also misses the deepest joy of family, which is that sense of connection to the great wheel of life. Giving birth to, educating and loving a kid are among the profound joys of human existence. "Brokeback Mountain" cannot begin to imagine such a thing; that reality simply is not on its radar, and if you looked at the story from another vantage -- the children's -- it would be a different tale altogether: about greedy, selfish, undisciplined homosexuals who took out a contract in the heterosexual world, and abandoned it. They weren't true men; they failed at the man's one sacred duty on Earth, which is to provide.

Having babies is universally accepted as a "profound joy"?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/01/AR2006020102477.html

...emphasis mine.

I'm sorry... huh?

xpost

THOSE RED STATE CONSERVATIVES ARE RESISTING THE RIVER SODOM AS IT OVERFLOWS ITS BANKS.

http://www.queerty.com/queer/brokeback-art-s.jpg

(OTOH, the best scene - Ennis flipping Alma over to give 'er the Old Jack Twist is also in the book, so it all balances out)

Yeah, the Twist Thanksgiving with the TV set.

And I agree with Anne Hathaway: she admitted that they were all surprised when Williams found the one correct way to say the line without laughing.

The Gillie Thanksgiving scene was ruined by his facial expression. Jaw set, narrowed eyes, thin mouth does not equal backbone, it equals petulant child mad at daddy. (Which is actually more accurate as to the content of the scene, but not what they wanted to portray, I think)

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18712

Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly (Fond of Each Other), is a story of forbidden love in small town Texas, written 25 years ago by the improbably named Ned Sublette. "Now a small town don't like it when somebody falls between sexes," runs the first verse, "No, a small town don't like it when a cowboy has feelings for men."

Awright, this song comes out of the closet with Willie Nelson!

Willie Nelson gay cowboy valentine OMG WTF!!