|
Editorial Review Product Description
Based on the short story by Pulitzer Prize-winning author E. Annie Proulx, BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN is the tragic and moving story of two cowboys who unexpectedly fall in love while working together one summer in 1963. When the film begins, rodeo cowboy Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) and ranch-hand Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) are strangers meeting for the first time. As the more outgoing one, it is Jack who must initiate a friendship with Ennis, a man so tight-lipped and self-consciously macho he refuses all facial expression. From this strained beginning, Jack and Ennis gradually begin to bond on cold lonely nights over a fire in the mountains of Signal, Wyoming. One particularly chilly evening, Jack invites Ennis into his tent, where a sudden awkward embrace sends their relationship in a new direction. Though each man stubbornly defends his heterosexuality, the spark between them cannot help but grow, with that initial summer on Brokeback Mountain becoming their reference point for happiness during the rest of their lives. Spanning 20 years, the film moves at an impressively slow pace that really captures the detailed and unhurried style of Proulx's story. Seeing each other a few times a year at best, Ennis and Jack spend the rest of their time half-heartedly living up to society's expectations by marrying and having kids. When the lovers do meet, there is a sense of love so palpable and frustrating it often manifests itself in physical violence. Gyllenhaal shines as the film's hopeful light, and Ledger gives a powerful performance as the emotionally blocked Ennis. Academy Award-winning director Ang Lee captures the natural beauty of Wyoming and Texas with camerawork that, while beautiful, never feels imposing. Gustavo Santaolalla's simple yet haunting score helps to complete a beautiful portrait of regret and wasted chances. ... Read more Customer Reviews (1148) 
The Love That Dares Not Speak Its Name
According to a famous dictum of Henry David Thoreau, most men lead lives of quiet desperation. In the highly successful film Brokeback Mountain, based upon a short story by E. Annie Proulx, and directed by Ang Lee, the men who exemplify this proposition are a pair of cowboys who pursue a frustrated and frustrating affair over a period of several years. In 1963, while tending sheep in the Wyoming back country, two young men, Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhal) and Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) end up sharing a tent one cold but frenzied night, during which Ennis anally penetrates Jack. The two men's lives subsequently diverge and both marry.
While Ennis' marriage unravels when his wife becomes aware of his attachment to his buddy, Jack moves to Texas and, after sleeping with the daughter of a wealthy businessman, marries her and gets a comfortable job working for daddy. Nevertheless, the two manage to continue their liaison until Jack demands that Ennis live with him. The latter refuses, relating a traumatic experience he had had as a child when an older man living with his friend was beaten to death. When Ennis some time later sends Jack a postcard, it comes back marked "Deceased," and the movie suggests his lover may have been the victim of a similar act of violence.
The performances by Ledger and Gyllenhal are the movie's strongest asset. Otherwise Brokeback Mountain is a far from exceptional film. Compositionally mediocre, Lee's production lacks visual imagination, alternating between kitschy panoramas of the great outdoors and dreary views of small towns, gaudy saloons, and the cluttered dwellings of Ennis and Jack. Where Lee's earlier film Eat Drink Man Woman (1994) had a vividly depicted setting in Taipei with sharply observed characters, this movie seems to be taking place on the other side of the moon. Ennis and Jack no doubt deserve a better fate, but so does the audience.
The movie falls back upon one of the most durable if dubious myths of American culture: the redeeming power of nature. In the great outdoors nature itself sanctifies the union still unblessed today by the powers that be in the United States. But the tradition was always ambivalent: if the frontier, whether terrestrial or aquatic, tolerated certain kinds of otherwise taboo male relationships, it conveniently quarantined them at the same time. And a price always had to be paid whenever this transgression crossed the border back into civilization. Brokeback Mountain remains faithful to the tradition by killing off Jack and condemning Ennis to a life of celibacy.
Brokeback Mountain is a gay cowboy movie, right? Not at all. The movie portrays a homosexual relationship, but it leaves the question of the sexuality of the two men up in the air. Although Jack is shown as a bisexual philanderer whose escapades may have caused his death, Ennis remains a sexually enigmatic Rock of Gibraltar right up to the final fade out. Jean Renoir said of Alfred Hitchcock's Rope, "It's supposed to be about homosexuals, and you don't even see the boys kiss each other. What's that?" In this movie, the cowboys do a good deal more than just kiss, but they never manage to put their desires into words. What's that?
Many years ago, homosexuality was often euphemistically referred to as "The love that dares not speak its name." After 1969, the year of Stonewall, few people would have any longer used the phrase except with ironic contempt. But in an odd way Brokeback Mountain makes that cliché come literally true. Ennis and Jack are sympathetic characters, but in the way the film presents them, they come across as inarticulate clods. Throughout a long movie the two men directly address each other a handful times.
It is only necessary to go back to the 1950s to grasp what is woefully absent from the film. Let us imagine that the movie could have been made at that time with a screenplay by Tennessee Williams and with Elia Kazan as director--a playwright who often depicted outsiders and a director with an incredible talent for transferring such figures to the screen. Without a doubt, the two men would have been pouring their hearts out to each other from reel one. Characters like Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront or Cal in East of Eden are hardly intellectuals, but they express themselves quite effectively--even eloquently at moments.
This inarticulateness is quite coherent with the way the movie presents the course of love between the two. Their first encounter is simply wordless, without even being preceded by any of the locker room banter about sex common among straight males. When the two couple in the middle of the night, it is as if God had sent a plague down on them that they can only passively endure. Just to underline the point, the next day Ennis discovers a wolf has killed one of the sheep, an omen of the fate that awaits them. Here we are far away from the still quite realistic territory of Williams and Kazan and closer to celluloid Transylvania where characters become werewolves overnight after violating some taboo. Following the discovery of the dead sheep, I nearly expected Maria Ouspenskaya to show up as a gypsy fortuneteller and see a pentagram on Ennis' chest.
Brokeback Mountain allots Ennis and Jack their moments of fleeting pleasure, letting them kiss and even romp about in the nude, but they end up paying for these moments many times over, just like any pair of adulterous lovers in the old days of the Production Code. By contrast, in From Here to Eternity (1951), James Jones introduces a secondary character, Bloom, an Army boxer who is Jewish and a closeted homosexual who blows out his brains in the barracks. Bloom reflects his own internalized hatred for homosexuals of the men around him, but he turns that reflection into an act of violent defiance, not passive submission to the status quo.
I'll call it what it is: boring
If it wasn't about a Gay couple, no one would have seen it.Let this be a lesson to any would be writer or director, it'll be your cash cow, if you are sitting on a bad to mediocre romance story, if you write the couple as gay, no one will have the courage to give it a bad review or even call it what it is; boring.Seriously, rent "The English Patient," & be slightly more entertained.
A movie that will stay with me for the rest of my life
I know the title sounds very drastic or dramatic, but thats just how i feel. This movie simply puts the energy of love, in all her glory on display,for the world to witness,and lessons are taught as she is betrayed.I think one of the reasons why this movie is so profound to millions of people, is because straights can witness that gay love is just like theirs. Love is the common bond between all of us here on this green earth, and Brokeback Mountain illustrates that beautifully.
Brokeback boredom
Mumbled dialogue, abject sqalour and dysfuctional relationships.And oh so boring.I enjoyed the mountain scenes with the sheep, but they only occupied about 1% of the movie.Interesting that so many people rate it highly on Amazon, everone I have actually met thought the same as I did.Must be a sampling artefact.
The Tainting of the Last American Icon
American Icons have been under attack the last half-century or so, a process that was started by the Left, accelerated in the '60s by the counter-culture, and carried on in the 70s-today by Hollywood and television.You name it, if it's an American Icon, it's been trashed ..... the church, the Pilgrims, Columbus, George Washington, sports heroes, American business, the American military, the police, the President, "Dead White Males," etc etc.All to cut out our beliefs, make us weak, make us ashamed of our heritage, and open us up to radical change.BUT there was always the Cowboy.The Cowboy, the strong, self-reliant, self-confident yet humble, physically and mentally tough Cowboy.He faced down the elements, wild animals, Indian attacks, and outlaws; he rode horses all day, roped cattle, slept out in front of a fire, and shot guns when he had to.Now THAT was an image that Americans could look upon and get some inspiration from.
So of course, Hollywood had to go after the Cowboy and trash him in our minds.Replace that image with something twisted.OK, let's see, let's make him gay!And two of them getting it on out in the wilderness!Now, make this into a seemingly intelligent, compelling & artful movie, so the critics have less reason to put it down, and there it is ............ you've just shot down one of America's icons.Anytime anyone brings up the Cowboy as an example of America's proud past and toughness, and some snide jerk will snicker, "Oh yeah, just like Brokeback Mountain," and undercut the argument with sarcasm and derision.SO that's what this movie is all about.It's called Cultural Marxism.Destroy America's cultural icons, and you can manipulate Americans.(See my review of American Beauty for another example.)
The filmmakers dropped two gay Greenwich Villiage guys into Wyoming and Texas, made them cowboys, and ran their little "love" story.They COULD HAVE changed the characters and setting and kept a similar story, but no, they had to go for the jugular, and trash the image of the Cowboy.Next thing you know, they'll make a movie about Patton and make him gay.Or two gay Marines on Iwo Jima.Whatever.
As for the plot, the acting, the scenery, the story, the music, the directing, that's all secondary to this agenda.But I give the movie 3 stars because much as you might HATE the agenda, the story is entertaining.
... Read more
|
