Why aren't they nelly?
Brokeback Mountain opens in Canada today in 3 cities, and in additional cities next week. The film has shown previously at the Toronto Film Festival in September, so at least some have already seen it. There have been several recent reviews and, as in the US, these have generally been enthusiastic. What follows is a mostly excellent review on CBC.ca today, except for one incongruous comment. More on that at the end.
Final Frontier
Brokeback Mountain’s story of cowboy lovers is a fairy-tale romance
By Alec Scott
We all replay certain, significant scenes from our past: the first or last meeting with a friend; a turning point in a relationship with a parent. In the process of remembering, these scenes slow down in our minds, as though time itself has been stretched. While other memories may shrink to nothing, these ones sprawl out.
The opening scene of Brokeback Mountain plays out with the same slow pacing of an oft-analyzed memory. Two young cowboys, Ennis (Heath Ledger) and Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal), size each other up in the spring sunshine, while applying for summer jobs herding sheep. Jack curses his unreliable pick-up truck; Ennis chews grass and tips his Stetson to shade his eyes. The two don’t exchange a single word. It seems a nothing moment occurring in the middle of nowhere (next to a trailer in Signal, Wyoming, in 1963), but it marks the beginning of a lifelong love affair.
The scene’s stately delivery by director Ang Lee bodes well for what follows. The film, which is based a short story by Annie Proulx, often manages to make such ordinary moments almost mythic. Although the movie covers the bulk of two lives, Lee is a man with a slow hand who never rushes unnecessarily.
Up on the mountain, the shepherds swap miserable-upbringing stories around the fire. One is a dispossessed orphan, the other has a nasty old cuss for a father. Against a backdrop of majestic cliffs and coursing rivers, they laconically share the plain, sad facts of their childhoods: “he never came to see me ride at a rodeo;” “they repossessed the farm a year after my folks died.”
With Brokeback Mountain, the versatile Lee — whose work has ranged from the arty Asian fight film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to the Jane Austen adaptation Sense and Sensibility, from the comic book spectacle of The Incredible Hulk (his least inspired movie) to the suburban gothic The Ice Storm (his most) — masters the vernacular of yet another genre. As in classic Westerns, Lee paints a stark contrast between the barren emotional landscapes inhabited by his characters and the grand natural ones.
For one summer, Ennis and Jack are afforded a respite from their hardscrabble lives, and they roughhouse and joke their way into each other’s arms. They know from the start they will never enjoy an open relationship. In its impossibility, the film plays the same love-can’t-quite-conquer-all notes that made Casablanca (and, more recently, Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven) sing.
Once they come down to earth, they both get married; Ennis to his high-school sweetheart (Michelle Williams), Jack to a rodeo queen (Anne Hathaway). Neither the short story nor the film treat these women as one-note victims and the actresses each give stand-out performances. The rodeo mistress grows brassy and callous (and assumes a peroxided ‘do to match), while the gentle sweetheart acquires a spine.
But it is the men’s movie and Ledger and Gyllenhaal throw themselves into their roles (and at each other) with abandon. It’s a little jarring that neither of the characters seems the slightest bit nelly; it’s as if this is a vision of gay life brought to you by the Log Cabin Republicans (the U.S. group of gay conservatives). It’s equally implausible that despite having been taught to hate queers — as a lesson, Ennis’s dad once showed him the corpse of a gay man who had been beaten to death — that both boys’ innards didn’t somehow get completely twisted. They are still innocent enough to sustain a loving, long-term affair and be, in their own ways, true to each other. Again, an “As if!” bell goes off. But the prettiness of the fantasy eventually wins out over such quibbles.
Lee details the middle and end of the affair with the same slow precision as its beginning, and the whole has a fairy-tale quality. If it was never really like this, it ought to have been, because the sweet that Proulx and Lee share with their protagonists far outweighs the bitter.
It’s only in retrospect that we learn the full meaning of such moments as that first meeting. That’s why we replay them. Brokeback Mountain’s first scene could have been portrayed as the moment when everything started to go wrong. Instead, it marks the beginning of a rise into the high country. Once visited, those heights can’t easily be forgotten. The memory is not diminished by all the ensuing drabness, and no number of replays can take its power away.
Now, just a minute here
It’s a little jarring that neither of the characters seems the slightest bit nelly; it’s as if this is a vision of gay life brought to you by the Log Cabin Republicans (the U.S. group of gay conservatives).
While I find the rest of that paragraph not particularly well-reasoned, I really wonder about this part.
Hmmm. Does this guy know any gay people? He writes about theatre and film, so you would think he should at least have met one or two. Then again, maybe all the gay people he's met are Liberace clones. To use his own words, "As if!"
Being gay doesn't always mean you have to have "nelly" characteristics and being straight doesn't mean you won't have
Besides, what the fuck does he think those should be in this film - perhaps eating beans out of a can with the pinky extended or walking like Nathan Lane in The Birdcage as he attempted to mimic John Wayne's gait or
Ennis: What do you think of chartreuse for the inside of the tent?
Jack: What's wrong with you, Mary! With my skin tone?
Of course, Proulx's vision of the ordinariness of her characters is strongly drawn in the novella - these are men who externally typify the macho cowboy myth, but they are also men who have sex with one another and, more importantly, love one another.
Perhaps this is the truly disconcerting part for Scott and others.
If these two men are gay then what about the guy sitting next to you on the subway, the contractor who's rebuilding your kitchen, the cop who stopped you last time you were driving too fast, the stodgy old accountant who finds you the tax breaks you need. If you can't identify who's gay then how can you know what to fear.
And then again, maybe . . .
Maybe that's what this film should do. It should make it so disconcerting for those with preconceived notions of what it is to be gay that they can't trust their prejudices any more. Maybe, just maybe, that's not just another pretty fantasy.
Ah well, that's what this stodgy old accountant would like to believe.
Final Frontier
Brokeback Mountain’s story of cowboy lovers is a fairy-tale romance
By Alec Scott
We all replay certain, significant scenes from our past: the first or last meeting with a friend; a turning point in a relationship with a parent. In the process of remembering, these scenes slow down in our minds, as though time itself has been stretched. While other memories may shrink to nothing, these ones sprawl out.
The opening scene of Brokeback Mountain plays out with the same slow pacing of an oft-analyzed memory. Two young cowboys, Ennis (Heath Ledger) and Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal), size each other up in the spring sunshine, while applying for summer jobs herding sheep. Jack curses his unreliable pick-up truck; Ennis chews grass and tips his Stetson to shade his eyes. The two don’t exchange a single word. It seems a nothing moment occurring in the middle of nowhere (next to a trailer in Signal, Wyoming, in 1963), but it marks the beginning of a lifelong love affair.
The scene’s stately delivery by director Ang Lee bodes well for what follows. The film, which is based a short story by Annie Proulx, often manages to make such ordinary moments almost mythic. Although the movie covers the bulk of two lives, Lee is a man with a slow hand who never rushes unnecessarily.
Up on the mountain, the shepherds swap miserable-upbringing stories around the fire. One is a dispossessed orphan, the other has a nasty old cuss for a father. Against a backdrop of majestic cliffs and coursing rivers, they laconically share the plain, sad facts of their childhoods: “he never came to see me ride at a rodeo;” “they repossessed the farm a year after my folks died.”
With Brokeback Mountain, the versatile Lee — whose work has ranged from the arty Asian fight film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to the Jane Austen adaptation Sense and Sensibility, from the comic book spectacle of The Incredible Hulk (his least inspired movie) to the suburban gothic The Ice Storm (his most) — masters the vernacular of yet another genre. As in classic Westerns, Lee paints a stark contrast between the barren emotional landscapes inhabited by his characters and the grand natural ones.
For one summer, Ennis and Jack are afforded a respite from their hardscrabble lives, and they roughhouse and joke their way into each other’s arms. They know from the start they will never enjoy an open relationship. In its impossibility, the film plays the same love-can’t-quite-conquer-all notes that made Casablanca (and, more recently, Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven) sing.
Once they come down to earth, they both get married; Ennis to his high-school sweetheart (Michelle Williams), Jack to a rodeo queen (Anne Hathaway). Neither the short story nor the film treat these women as one-note victims and the actresses each give stand-out performances. The rodeo mistress grows brassy and callous (and assumes a peroxided ‘do to match), while the gentle sweetheart acquires a spine.
But it is the men’s movie and Ledger and Gyllenhaal throw themselves into their roles (and at each other) with abandon. It’s a little jarring that neither of the characters seems the slightest bit nelly; it’s as if this is a vision of gay life brought to you by the Log Cabin Republicans (the U.S. group of gay conservatives). It’s equally implausible that despite having been taught to hate queers — as a lesson, Ennis’s dad once showed him the corpse of a gay man who had been beaten to death — that both boys’ innards didn’t somehow get completely twisted. They are still innocent enough to sustain a loving, long-term affair and be, in their own ways, true to each other. Again, an “As if!” bell goes off. But the prettiness of the fantasy eventually wins out over such quibbles.
Lee details the middle and end of the affair with the same slow precision as its beginning, and the whole has a fairy-tale quality. If it was never really like this, it ought to have been, because the sweet that Proulx and Lee share with their protagonists far outweighs the bitter.
It’s only in retrospect that we learn the full meaning of such moments as that first meeting. That’s why we replay them. Brokeback Mountain’s first scene could have been portrayed as the moment when everything started to go wrong. Instead, it marks the beginning of a rise into the high country. Once visited, those heights can’t easily be forgotten. The memory is not diminished by all the ensuing drabness, and no number of replays can take its power away.
Now, just a minute here
It’s a little jarring that neither of the characters seems the slightest bit nelly; it’s as if this is a vision of gay life brought to you by the Log Cabin Republicans (the U.S. group of gay conservatives).
While I find the rest of that paragraph not particularly well-reasoned, I really wonder about this part.
Hmmm. Does this guy know any gay people? He writes about theatre and film, so you would think he should at least have met one or two. Then again, maybe all the gay people he's met are Liberace clones. To use his own words, "As if!"
Being gay doesn't always mean you have to have "nelly" characteristics and being straight doesn't mean you won't have
Besides, what the fuck does he think those should be in this film - perhaps eating beans out of a can with the pinky extended or walking like Nathan Lane in The Birdcage as he attempted to mimic John Wayne's gait or
Ennis: What do you think of chartreuse for the inside of the tent?
Jack: What's wrong with you, Mary! With my skin tone?
Of course, Proulx's vision of the ordinariness of her characters is strongly drawn in the novella - these are men who externally typify the macho cowboy myth, but they are also men who have sex with one another and, more importantly, love one another.
Perhaps this is the truly disconcerting part for Scott and others.
If these two men are gay then what about the guy sitting next to you on the subway, the contractor who's rebuilding your kitchen, the cop who stopped you last time you were driving too fast, the stodgy old accountant who finds you the tax breaks you need. If you can't identify who's gay then how can you know what to fear.
And then again, maybe . . .
Maybe that's what this film should do. It should make it so disconcerting for those with preconceived notions of what it is to be gay that they can't trust their prejudices any more. Maybe, just maybe, that's not just another pretty fantasy.
Ah well, that's what this stodgy old accountant would like to believe.
Comments
We ARE kindred spirits.
By John Polly
Originally printed 12/15/2005 (Issue 1350 - Between The Lines News)
Believe the buzz. "Brokeback Mountain," the acclaimed short story by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Proulx, which drew raves when it first appeared in 1997, is now a film and is heading your way. And yes, it's good. Very, very good. Think an epic love story on a Titanic-scale, gorgeously filmed against a stark and stunning Western landscape. From start to finish, the film is carefully made and well-acted, not to mention respectful, heartbreaking and powerful.
Led by career-making performances by its two stars, Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger (the Oscar buzz has already begun), "Brokeback Mountain" delivers, more than any other gay-themed film that has preceded it, a humane, visceral love story that may just have even the sternest movie critics among us sobbing into their Stetson.
Boasting a screenplay by the always brilliant Larry McMurtry ("Terms of Endearment," "Lonesome Dove") and Diana Ossana, "Brokeback Mountain" is gently and lovingly directed by Ang Lee, known for telling humane stories ("Sense & Sensibility," "The Ice Storm") as well as crafting films of rousing action or heartfelt laughs ("Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," "The Wedding Banquet"). Even Gustavo Santaolalla's haunting and delicately mesmerizing score finely supplements the onscreen desire and tension. And the film stars two handsome, gifted, up-and-coming actor in the roles of two star-crossed cowhands. It all works beautifully.
The basic story? Jack (Gyllenhaal) and Ennis (Ledger) meet while working together one summer herding sheep in Wyoming, the two of them sequestered way up in the hills on Brokeback Mountain. They become friends, and then more. And they fall in love.
The summer ends and they part, resigned to the fact that in 1963 Wyoming, guys like them don't have a chance of making a go of any kind of real relationship thanks to society's bigotry and their own fear. A few years later they reunite, and then proceed to meet up for "fishing trips" - same time, next year-style. Both men get married and start families, but they still hanker for the kind of love, sex and intimacy they were able to find on Brokeback Mountain. Ennis is strong, stubborn, tight-lipped and fearful; Jack, perhaps more open and eager to seek real comfort, still wants more.
All of this is told in measured scenes, with eloquently written and pointed, if often brief, exchanges. The scenery is gorgeous and harsh, much like the story.
And it's the power of Brokeback's story that roped in Gyllenhaal and Ledger to the project. "When I read the script, I thought the story was amazing," says Gyllenhaal of his initial take on this epic tale. "I just fell in love with it and realized that I had to do this film."
His costar concurs. "The decision to do the film was pretty much made for me by the script," says Ledger in his smoky, Australian-accented voice. "It was the most beautiful screenplay I'd ever read. And after reading Annie Proulx's brilliant short story, I felt like it was definitely going to be intriguing and challenging to tell this story. Particularly, because Ennis has very few words to express his battle and his issues. Ang Lee was attached to direct, and I felt he was perfect to tell this story. I didn't want to walk away from something so perfect; that would have been crazy."
Crazy, indeed. And while Hollywood has gotten decidedly more gay-friendly thematically in recent years, some showbiz types still get squeamish when it comes to playing gay. "I understood that it was a fear for quite a lot of other people in this industry," offers Ledger, regarding whether or not he had doubts about playing a man-loving ranch-hand. "But I never felt like I had anything at stake; there was no risk. The only anxiety I had was that the project was so perfect, I didn't want to be responsible for fucking it up," he says, laughing.
"The question of sexuality and these characters' issues with it wasn't was pushed me to do this, or scared me about it," explains Gyllenhaal. "I'm in the business of helping stories get told, and I love this story. People don't say to me, When you were in 'Proof,' were you afraid to play a mathematician? Or, Was it scary to play a Marine in 'Jarhead?' Why is that?"
Not surprisingly, both actors are also happy to speak out the importance of this story, and the message it sends. "There's no doubt that this is a gay love story," says Gyllenhaal. "But I don't think that these two characters even know what gay is. Before we started shooting, Ang Lee and James [Schamus, the film's producer] gave us books about first-hand accounts of guys growing up in the Midwest and their encounters with men and their attraction to men, and what that was, and even they didn't understand what it was, or what they were feeling. So to me, there are a lot of things that this movie is deconstructing that I think are really fascinating."
Ledger agrees, and also sees the film's scope as ultimately universal. "Sure, they're two men in love with each other, but the film's point is that two men in love with each is just as universal as man and a woman, or two women - it's the same thing," he says. "In many ways, it's much bigger than a story about two gay men. It's a story for everyone. We put our hearts and souls into telling this story, and we're trying to broaden people's opinions and people's interest in coming to see the film-because it's a story of beauty."
Strengthening their commitment to "Brokeback Mountain" is the fact that both Gyllenhaal and Ledger have very personal connections to gay people, whose lives they hope to honor with this film. Gyllenhaal grew up with gay godparents - a male couple who were very close to his family.
"I do feel like there is a part of me who did this movie for them," he admits. "Maybe, almost naively, I don't really worry about how other people will respond to this, because I know I've done it for people I love."
Similarly, Ledger had an uncle in mind as he slipped on his boots to play Ennis. "My uncle's gay and he went through a hard time coming out to his dad in the 70s. His dad told him, 'You've got to go to a hospital and get fixed, or you've got to leave the family.' So he stood up and walked out and moved to L.A. and never came back. He's always found it hard to accept his sexuality, and maybe as a backlash to this and his father making him feel less masculine, he became more masculine. He's the head of an arm-wrestling federation and loves pit fighting! He's into bodybuilding and is the toughest, most masculine guy I know. That's why it was important to me to create Ennis as the most masculine character that I've ever played, to make that point."
And as it was for both Gyllenhaal and Ledger, the impact of a monumental and yet bracingly intimate story like "Brokeback Mountain" will be a very personal one for audiences. This is the kind of movie which prompts discussions, and that gay viewers can proudly claim. Best of all, the film has the capacity reach people in a very important way. "If anything, I think this movie might be able to tell younger people who are struggling with issue of their own sexuality and how they're feeling that it's okay," says Gyllenhaal. "That's what I have the most faith in."
And certainly, what's likely to remain with viewers is the central story of Jack and Ennis' quest for love, and the heroic struggle they face.
"What I feel is that we're all looking for intimacy, wherever we can find it," Gyllenhaal offers. "And when you find it with someone, you hold on to it as hard as you can. And that's all that matters."