This is the deal: I own around 350 movies on DVD and Blu-ray. Through June 10, 2015, I will be watching and writing about them all, in the order they are arranged on my shelf (i.e., alphabetically, with certain exceptions). No movie will be left unwatched . I welcome your comments, your words of encouragement and your declarations of my insanity.
Movie #41: Brokeback Mountain
I spend every second of this movie heartbroken. Every single one. I’m not sure it was possible to go into Brokeback Mountain not knowing it was about “gay cowboys” — it was all anybody was talking about in late 2005 – early 2006 — so I knew the second Heath Ledger (as Ennis Del Mar) gets out of that truck in the opening scene and the chyron says “1963,” this was going to be a tale of sorrow and sacrifice, of longing and denial and secrets.
These two boys, Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), being 18 or 19 when they first meet, fall deeply, irrevocably in love that summer up on Brokeback Mountain. And it’s not just Jack’s doing, even though he’s clearly the more experienced one, the one more aware of and comfortable with who he is, the instigator of their first sexual encounter. Ennis, a young man never given to strong words or strong feelings, is overcome with passion for Jack. And when that passion is released, he can’t escape it. He lets it wash over him all those weeks they’re up there alone together. He’s intimate and loving and open emotionally in ways he’ll never be with anyone else. He’s filled with anger and frustration that this can’t last, that he has to go back to that other life, and when they part he’s racked with sobs so violent they drop him to the ground, choking for air.
The heartbreak only grows from there. Alma (Michelle Williams), so clearly in love with her husband in the beginning, is soon scared by his angry outbursts. She feels rejected by his desire to make love to her from behind. More and more she feels like she can’t understand him, and she’s devastated and broken when she discovers the truth. She’s not even able to live in denial over it, either, because Ennis’s lies and excuses are thin and unsubstantiated. She doesn’t deserve this life, this man who will never love her or long for her the way he does Jack, and yet this is the life she has.
Jack’s wife Lureen (Anne Hathaway) lives a life of purpose and privilege, but her dissatisfaction and unhappiness play out on screen in the tragedy of her hair and makeup over the years — ever more processed, ever more garish, ever more false.
And Jack himself is a man who wears his heart on his sleeve. He dreams big. He wants to leave Lureen and go live with Ennis in a cabin on the Twist family ranch. He wants to build a life with Ennis, the life he needs. But Ennis is too practical and too scared to ever consider it, to ever understand just how much love Jack has for him and how much Jack believes their love could conquer all. Instead all they get are twenty years of stolen moments and cherished memories amid lives of pained resignation and emptiness.
It was eight and a half years ago when Brokeback Mountain came out. Only eight and a half years, and yet so much has changed. Back then it was a VERY big deal to tell the love story of two men in a major motion picture. It was “shocking” and “brave” of A-list, heartthrob actors Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal to take the lead roles. It was even more shocking that there would be scenes of them kissing and having sex. I mean, back in December 2005, of two of today’s most prominent gay actors — George Takei and Neil Patrick Harris — only Takei was out, and only recently at that. (Harris wouldn’t come out until nearly a year later.)
The previous year, in 2004, eleven states had voters approve constitutional bans on same-sex marriages. Today, several of those bans have been overturned, DOMA is a thing of the past, and same-sex marriage is legal in nineteen states and counting. Today, public figures come out as gay in offhand remarks, or in Instagram photos, or as an afterthought. Today there are shows that not only prominently feature gay couples, gay adoption, and gay marriage, but HBO’s Looking, for one, deals openly with gay sex. I’m not saying homosexuality is a completely accepted facet of our culture yet, there is much still to accomplish and many areas where homophobia and bigotry are still sadly prevalent. But when I think of the changes that have happened over just these eight and a half years, or the massive cultural shift in attitudes toward homosexuality from the early ’90s, when I was in high school, to today, I am filled with glorious hope and optimism that the world is changing, and changing for the better. There will always be heartbreak, but I look ahead with the knowledge that one day there will be less.
Viable Option 