Brokeback Mountain

So... Is it odd to watch Brokeback Mountain and come away most impressed with some of the women in it? Between this and The Baxter (which I didn't even particularly like), I'm growing quite fond of Michelle Williams. Backing off trying to be a traditional skinny blonde knockout is really working for her. Similarly, I was hugely pleased to see Kate Mara at the end; she made a great impression on me on Jack & Bobby. Sure, I'm partial to the freckly redheads anyway, but I'm still pretty sure she's something special.

This is one I put off seeing for a while - once I saw the Oscar nominations and realized I'd be spending a chunk of March working on moving, I realized that the usual Oscar catch-up wasn't going to happen this year. I also got stuck in the rut where I'd look at the schedules and it would be at an awkward time or I just really didn't feel like that kind of movie right then. I wound up with a MovieWatcher reward ticket that needed to be used that night and not wanting to get further from home than Harvard Square (there was, after all, the World Baseball Classic and 24 to see afterward) Hopefully passing on this to see Ultraviolet taught me a valuable lesson about how a good movie, even if it's not the particular genre or tone you're looking to see, is a better use of time and money than, well, crap.

One note to the folks at the Harvard Square theater: Change your trailers. There was a trailer for Cassanova on the front of this which, I think, has been, gone, and had its DVD release date announced. I think that there was one for Thank You For Smoking as well, and I think that came out this weekend (or is that just for New York/LA)?

Brokeback Mountain

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 20 March 2006 at the AMC Harvard Square #1 (First-run)

Brokeback Mountain is a remarkable film, and I expect it will remain one even after its notoriety passes. There will come a time, twenty years or so from now, when love stories involving two men will appear in theaters unremarked upon, and when that time comes, I think this film will still be remembered as more than one of the first movies to focus on two men in love to solidly enter the mainstream consciousness; it will be remembered as a being noteworthy even outside the cultural context of 2005 America.

It focuses, as most probably know by now, on two cowboys who find themselves attracted to each other while herding sheep on an isolated mountain in 1963 Wyoming. Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) is an orphan and man of few words and little formal education; he dropped out of high school after a year to start working. He's due to get married in the fall. Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) is more gregarious, preferring rodeos to ranching. Over the course of the summer, mostly isolated from the world except for weekly grocery deliveries and an encounter with another flock, they grow close, and their relationship makes the jump from camaraderie to the physical when drink and weather prompts them to share the tent.

The job ends. Time passes. Ennis marries Alma (Michelle Williams), and they have two daughters. Jack eventually meets Lureen Newsome (Anne Hathaway), marries her, going to work for her father and fathering a son of his own. He's still clearly looking at other guys, but Ennis doesn't seem to be. One could almost think Ennis had just been lonely on the mountaintop until Jack passes through town and suddenly Ennis is all over Jack before having time to think it might be a good idea to get where Alma can't accidentally see them. She does, but keeps quiet; it poisons their marriage, especially once Ennis and Jack get in the habit of meeting each other for "fishing trips" every few months.

That moment Ennis and Jack embrace after a four year absence comes, what, a half hour into the movie but it's the most important scene. The recklessness of it is passionate and alarming; at that moment it stops being this abstract gay-cowboy movie and about these two. It suddenly becomes heartfelt and real, but this is also when we see that their lives have changed since the summer they spent herding sheep. Before, their love was dangerous because it meant being ostracized or threatened; now, they've also got the quite conventional problem of potentially hurting the people who love them.

One thing that director Ang Lee and screenwriters Larry McMurtry & Diana Ossana (working from an Annie Proulx short story) do is show time passing. The film opens with a title card indicating it's April 1963, but the jumps forward (eventually arriving in 1983) tend to be introduced by a date being mentioned on a radio or television in the background. One thing that's thankfully avoided is the use of noticeable old-age makeup; Ledger and Gyllenhaal look a little older than nineteen at the start and don't quite seem to be pushing forty at the end, but the actors show the burden of experience. Even as they stay much the same, the background changes - it's initially kind of jarring to see Linda Cardellini, done up in seventies hair and fashions, flirting with Ledger's character after having mostly seen him in very Norman Rockwell-esque environs. At least four young actresses play Ennis's daughter Alma Jr., but casting has matched them well enough to make her a singular character. I also like how Ennis's second daughter, Jenny, sort of disappears midway through the movie, suggesting but not explicitly stating that the girls found out why their parents' marriage failed and that Alma Jr. is more forgiving than Jenny.

Ledger and Gyllenhaal have to carry the first half-hour or so of the movie by themselves, and it's almost surprising how well they're up to the task. Jake Gyllenhaal has the flashier part as Jack, and it's trickier that it looks - he gets to shout and run his mouth and kind of give off a vibe, but he's not ever allowed to be flamboyant in a way that would shout "gay" out of this context. Ledger, on the other hand, is given a much deeper closet. He speaks in at-times incomprehensible mumble that indicates both a rugged man-of-few-words masculinity and guardedness. There's something in his past that keeps him from pushing his luck like Jack - compare a Thanksgiving dinner where Jack explodes at his father-in-law with the guilt and shame Ennis seems to feel around his daughters.

Though Ledger and Gyllenhaal are the stars, the rest of the cast is rock-solid. In fact, it's Michelle Williams as Alma who actually makes your heart break. She's the one who gets dumped on with very little to do about it, and her reactions are a perfectly-performed mix of sadness, anger, and incomprehension. She's come a long way in the past few years, from being "the other girl on Dawson's Creek", to seeming out of place in The Station Agent, to being among the best parts of this and The Baxter. Anne Hathaway doesn't get quite so meaty a role - this is more Ennis's story than Jack's, anyway, we mostly see her grow distant, retreating into a cold beauty. She's initially just as exuberant as Gyllenhaal, so we notice this and it almost makes us dislike her: She's the wronged party, but we'd rather see her Lureen act on it like Alma does.

A lot of talent shows up for just a few scenes. Randy Quaid is in his close-cropped hardass mode here, as the domineering owner of the livestock Ennis and Jack tend. Linda Cardellini shows up in the 1970s as a waitress who takes an interest in the lonely Ennis, with David Harbour taking an interest in Jack (Anna Faris is his spazz of a wife, a characterization she's really nailed by now). Kate Mara is the last actress to play Alma Jr., and while she doesn't really resemble the younger girls who had played the role, she gets a great scene with Ledger (as does the prior actress, Cheyenne Hill).

Brokeback Mountain is longer than typical, especially for a story that does not have a particularly large cast of characters, but there aren't many minutes that don't work, and work extremely well. The half-hour we spend just getting to know Jack and Ennis at the beginning is important; it not only lets us get to know them, but it establishes their blue-collar credentials and prevents any gay stereotypes from entering our heads. The cinematography is exceptionally beautiful on its own, but it also emphasizes how Jack and Ennis can only be their true, natural selves when they get away from settled places, and other people. Ennis gets more palpably tense the more he's constrained; the trailer park he inhabits toward the end feels like a prison. Lee hasn't really made a Western here, despite the film occasionally being described as one, but he knows how to use the American (or Canadian, as the case may be) West to communicate freedom and both the joy and danger of being outside the reach of law and standards.

That's why Brokeback Mountain is an exceptional movie, and possibly a great one. It's made by people who not only have something to say, but wit hthe craftsmanship to say it in a way that doesn't rely on rattling the audience. That's why this film will be remembered well after the jokes of the past six months are forgotten.

(Formerly at EFC) Next up: Night One of the Boston Underground Film Festival, which, thanks to the fun of writing without an internet connection, will be in the books by the time I post this.

(But I'll back date this to 7:05 pm, when I finished writing it offline. Because I'd be sneaky if I didn't insist on typing things like the preceeding paragraph.)