by Patrick Ball
Brokeback Mountain, I’ll never wish I knew how to quit you. I turned 17 in 2005, the year I came out to my parents, and the quiet revolution that was Brokeback Mountain was the first movie I took them to. We saw it on a misty winter afternoon at The Pruneyard in Campbell, CA. It was the first movie I took them to and said “this is me”.
It’s hard to grapple with the fact that 2005 was 20 years ago. That this film, this miracle of cinematic craftsmanship wrapped around a soul aching romantic drama, was met with both snickers and scorn upon release. Though critically acclaimed, and championed by those willing to embrace “the love that dare not say its neigh-me”, its immediate legacy was riddled with jokes. “The gay cowboy movie”, “I wish I knew how to quit you”, Michelle Williams’ immortal utterance of “Jack Nasty”...
The movie became derisively quotable, and the toxic masculinity and a culture unable to reckon with earnest romantic love between men on their largest screens were summed up in one word- unforgettably growled by Jack Nicholson on the Oscars stage: “Crash”.
But, with the untimely death of the kaleidoscopically talented Heath Ledger, the culture began to catch up with the critics and the early champions. It began a reappraisal, buoyed by cultural shifts in the way gay people were presented in media, in many ways due directly to this film. People rediscovered the myth and the majesty, the sparklingly performed and the achingly beautiful film that is Brokeback Mountain. And now 20 years later, it is commonly regarded as one of the best films of the 21st century, and for me at least, one of the finest to ever be captured on celluloid.
“If you can’t fix it, you have to stand it.”
Brokeback Mountain is an elegy, an aching ode to freedom, to the places and people we carry inside that for too many of us are the only places we call home. It’s a romance, at times blisteringly romantic. It’s a tragedy, a cautionary tale of chances lost and memories gained. But through every frame, it’s a story about loneliness. How the prison of mid-century masculinity creates men left only unto themselves; without the tools to process, to connect, to feel their humanity in all the ways that make a person really alive. How the queer experience so often lives in secrecy, in shadows, burdened by the ever present spectre of paranoia. How cycles of violence cut us off from promise, from hope, from the salvation of trust. But the ultimate loneliness is expressed in the American promise. That with gumption, hard work, and a pretty little wife you can rise up the ranks and collect all the treasures you so richly deserve. A fallacy so ingrained in our worldview that the resulting disappointment manifests in the vast emptiness so many men feel. Brokeback Mountain is a war film, about the war we wage inside.
This film has so many standout images. Director Ang Lee and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto plumb the natural majesty of the Wyoming heartland, and the stark emptiness of low-income small town interiors with matching depth. One of the most vivid, and famous, images being Ennis lit from behind by fourth of July fireworks; separated from his wife in the image by fire, by propulsive anger, by the toxicity of his upbringing, and separated from himself by fear.
The performances are miraculous from top to bottom. From Anna Faris’ chatterbox socialite, to the remarkable Linda Cardellini as Ennis’ last chance at (seeming) happiness. Anne Hathaway is radiant and deceptively canny, and Randy Quaid (though one of our most insane celebrities in real life) proves a bracing example of the menace of expectant masculinity.
Michelle Williams, in still maybe her greatest performance, is a marvel. She had been great already, as the delightful but doomed Jen on Dawson’s Creek, and in a truly underrated great comic performance, a lovelorn, dog-walking, teenage foil for tricky Nixon in the Watergate comedy Dick. But, in what feels like a radical step onto the feature film stage, she manages in looks, subtlety, and subtext to absolutely earthquake through this movie. With limited dialogue, her face, that gorgeously expressive face, is lined with cautious hope, crushing betrayal, youth wasted by resignation, and always weighed down by weariness. It’s a deeply generous performance that transcends the poor put-upon wife trope and crafts a woman who asks for little, and when presented the choice of an existence as a mere victim of circumstance, chooses life instead.
And Jake and Heath, where to even begin? There is a moment they share early on that says everything about their performances, and everything about this film. Jack and Ennis’ first encounter in their cowboy tent of man love is a primal one, all lust, all pent-up energy, all anger and action. Their second, just the next night, is the opposite. Heath’s Ennis paces outside the tent: unsure, eager, trepidatious, emboldened. And Jake’s Jack waits inside: more sure but cautious, treading a boundary hoping that the answer to his desire to heal his aching need to love is on the other side. When Ennis enters, Jack takes him in his arms and waits, letting Ennis decide for himself, but nudging him into a nest of long-needed safety. When they kiss, haltingly at first, then encouraged by Jack’s repeated “it’s ok, it’s ok”, it’s infused with sweetness and a soft power that says “you’re home here”. Then Ennis folds himself into Jack’s embrace, the fear and hatred, the grinding pressure of solitude melting bit by tiny bit on Heath Ledger’s face, and lays on Jack’s bare chest- skin to skin contact like a newborn and parent. Their love is like that- they parent each other, they push each other, they defy each other, they find sanctuary. They curb that omnipresent loneliness one night, one week, one year, and one life at a time.
The film is not a morality play, nor a depressing meditation on loss. It’s a celebration of belonging. That even those abandoned by the American Dream, betrayed by the expectations of their sex, and sentenced to a silent kind of love can carry a home deep inside them. A home that lives in memory, that was built in a tent on a mountain, that still feels like the arms of the man you loved around you. And that that home will always have a light on, welcoming you in when the cold of that loneliness feels too much yet again.
Brokeback Mountain was nominated for 8 Oscars at the 78th Academy Awards winning 3: Best Original Score (Gustavo Santaolalla), Best Adapted Screenplay (Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana) and Best Director (Ang Lee). It’s currently celebrating a 20th Anniversary Re-release in theaters through the end of June. Happy Pride.