Reflections on a Film
I write this on the eve of the Academy Awards, hoping that Brokeback Mountain will take the big prize for Best Picture. Everybody else in the cyberspace has weighed in on this film (more on that later), and I suppose it’s time for me to do so as well.
Believe it or not, BBM played on Guam in February, though briefly. I assumed that it wouldn’t and instead saw it in Honolulu when I was there in January. The audience was mostly straight couples, near as I could tell, and I wondered if this film really was the crossover hit that so many critics claimed. Oprah told people to go, and apparently it’s become a date film, with women looking for good romance and their boyfriends accommodating them, even if they are uncomfortable with the idea of seeing two men . . . well, you know, doing it. (Jesus Christ, guys, you wanna join the 20th century, now that we’ve started the 21st? Thanks.)
Surprisingly to me, I wasn’t nearly as moved by the film as I assumed that I would be, until the very end. That final scene with Ennis Del Mar holding Jack Twist’s shirt with his own shirt inside, saying, “Jack, I swear . . .” moved me so deeply that I had to walk around mindlessly after the film, really numb and emotionally shaken. In the theater, I got very teary, something that happens very rarely to me when I see films—though pretty often when I’m reading. I’ve since tried to figure out why BBM didn’t take me by the throat initially, and I think it’s because this story is so very familiar to me. That is to say, I know a fair number of closeted gay men who are married or otherwise trapped in circumstances that will never let them love the men whom they really want to. The territory is very familiar to me, I regret to say, though thankfully it’s not my personal experience. Thus I won’t say that I knew how the film would end, but I certainly had a good sense of the story’s potential outline, and that allowed me a little distance. On the other hand, other gay friends of mine have written to me, saying that they cried for days afterward—in some cases have broken down while commuting and had to pull off the road. One friend in particular was deeply affected by it in that he lived out West for a few years and nearly got married. If he had, he would be living the life of Ennis Del Mar. The film cut way too close to the bone.
In a way, the distance was a good thing, because it allowed me to look at the film rather than watch it, the way a critic might. And please don’t get the impression that I didn’t like the film. In fact, I loved it. Heath Ledger’s and Jake Gyllenhaal’s performances are wonderful as Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist, the two men in love with each other, but I recall really being impressed with Michelle Phillips and Anne Hathaway as their two suffering wives trapped in loveless marriages. Both have relatively small roles. Phillips carries on a long, slow suffering in a very brief set of scenes; the one where she cries alone in her kitchen, confronting to herself what she knows about her husband, will break your heart, as will the Thanksgiving dinner scene where she confronts what she saw years before—her husband passionately kissing his real love. Hathaway’s final scene, where she talks to Ennis after her husband Jack has died is just a plain stunner: without giving too much away, we’re not sure exactly what she knows or not, but the range of emotions she plays, all while talking to Ennis in a low, modulated, cold voice, is a knockout. Ledger is simply marvelous: Ennis is one of those men who seems to think that he only has so many words allotted to him in his life, and when he uses them up, he’ll die, and Ledger captures this. If anything, Ledger underplays his role as Ennis and somehow manages to inhabit him, all small gestures, laconic speech, and rigidly, tightly capped emotions. Gyllenhaal has a harder role, perhaps: Jack Twist is the dreamer, the one who thinks that a life with another man in 1960s and ’70s Wyoming is a real possibility. One of his last scenes, where, so angry at his occasional shot at happiness over the years with Ennis, he says at the end of a long jag, “I wish I knew how to quit you,” encapsulates all the mixture of deep regret, rage, and love that he has for this man. It too will break your heart.
And that’s the point: this movie will break your heart. I mean to say seriously that no film that I can think of is as full of deep sorrow as this one, but it’s not the film that made me realize this. It’s the short story that Annie Proulx wrote that it’s based on, also titled “Brokeback Mountain,” first published in The New Yorker in 1997, later found in her collection Close Range: Wyoming Stories (1999), and set where she lives and writes. I checked it out of the library to look at the story and read it aloud to myself to get a sense of the flavor. Proulx is brilliant at capturing the taciturn, terse speech of Wyomingites in her dialogue, and you really need to read her aloud to capture what she’s doing. I could not get through the story without weeping, and I mean weeping. It is that moving.
Now, of course, I want to return to the film and see it again, as many seem to be doing. I’ve done some web surfing and discovered blog pages so devoted to this film that it’s kind of unbelievable. Some of clearly fan pages, which is fine, but one has an open forum where bloggers can dissect the film, scene by scene. And they do. The scene where Jack goes to collect Jack’s ashes at his parent’s house, for example, is discussed for 34 webpages—and that’s just a five-minute scene. Clearly, this film is speaking to something out there: it seems to be the story that a lot of people need told because they’ve already lived it. But it’s also just an enormously felt, really romantic movie. And for all the sorrow, this is a sweeping romantic movie. The romance is rough, masculine, utterly unvarnished, incomprehensible to the lovers, and often inarticulate. But it’s so damn real. Please go see it.
