Brokeback Mountain (2005)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Brokeback Mountain (2005) – A. Lee

It’s a tragedy.  It’s a love story.  It’s a tragic love story.  Of course it is, because it is about two cowboys in the 1960s who have a passionate affair one summer alone on the titular mountain in Wyoming.  The affair itself with its beautifully filmed scenic backdrop is delicately handled by director Ang Lee (but not without some visceral moments); however, it is the decades long aftermath that is really the focus of the picture.  Heath Ledger gives a truly exceptional performance as Ennis Del Mar, a man of few words but with strong and deep emotions restrained inside him. Jake Gyllenhaal is Jack Twist, a rodeo bull-rider, who seems weaker than Del Mar but more willing to take risks for love, despite society’s prejudice.  After their initial time together, life takes them into the conventional roles for men in that decade – husband (to Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway, respectively) and father (to two girls and one boy, respectively).  The screenplay (by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana from a story by Annie Proulx) conveys the pain that both men feel in these relationships that do not offer them true love.  And the consequences play out much as you can expect, sadly.  Although this is an expensive prestige picture, and perhaps too safe and polished at times, the acting (particularly by Ledger) contributes to a moving (and crushing) feature that reminds us how far (and yet sometimes not so far) we have come in our journey as a society.