|
Many
of us remember our first reading of Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain
when it appeared in the New
Yorker in 1997 (horribly foreshadowing the tragedy
which ended Matthew Shepard’s life) and the ensuing shock of
recognition that in the lives of Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar a
love like ours was, at long last, represented in the New Yorker’s
hallowed fiction pages. Many of us kept that issue (and some of
us could probably now sell that issue for a tidy sum on eBay).
And now, eight years later, comes the film, as if to test
Hollywood’s mettle in dealing honestly, at long last, with a
love as old as the Greeks. Perhaps not since the 1982 clunker
Making Love has
there been a major Hollywood film of a gay love story (and for
which the insipid Making
Love deserves at least part of the blame), and this
time around, Hollywood seems determined to get it right. Of
course it helps to have Ang Lee at the helm, he of the
oh-so-observant eye and the most steady of gazes, and also two
break-out actors, Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger, on their way
to the brass ring, as well as accolades from the rounds of film
festivals (Brokeback
Mountain won the Golden Lion for Best Film in
Venice), and the accompanying thunder of a full-tilt press
junket. To say that the film has been anticipated, nearly as
much as the film version of
Rent, is akin to saying Jack and Ennis have a thing
for each other. And that’s what we’re almost afraid to see
onscreen – for how often have we sat in darkened theatres and
listened to the tittering and the catcalls whenever two men on
the silver screen have expressed even the slightest bit of
homoerotic interest in each other? How many films have we
endured where a love like ours has been the punchline of a joke
– or more often, given Hollywood’s homophobia, the catalyst for
tragedy.
And while Brokeback Mountain
is most definitely a tragedy, it is also, and perhaps more
tellingly, a true cinematic love story, along the lines of other
great heterosexual love tragedies, such as A Place in the Sun, Casablanca,
The English Patient, and Titanic. At long
last, a big Hollywood love story where the voices are in the
same register and neither mouth wears lipstick and there’s hair
on both chests – and still, you can feel your heart beating
faster and you’re holding your breath, hoping that no one around
you breaks into nervous laughter or shouts obscenities at the
screen when Jack and Ennis finally kiss. And not only do they
kiss, our two star-crossed lovers waste not a word as they
grapple in the pup tent they share high atop Brokeback
Mountain. Lee does the film, and the story, a great service
here by getting the down-and-dirty out of the way. It’s the
curiosity factor – Is that
how they do it? – and Lee gives his audience a quick
answer, and then moves swiftly on. For the real story here is
not so much the sexual attraction, which is indeed palpable
between Jack and Ennis as played by Gyllenhaal and Ledger, but
more importantly, the very real love which develops over the
course of time.
Larry McMurtry and Diana
Ossana’s screenplay (written in 1997) manages to open Proulx’s
story in the most natural fashion, with scenes of Jack’s and
Ennis’s respective domestic lives, and even introducing
peripheral characters, and yet always the film’s focus remains
on the love at the story’s center. One testament to the
screenplay’s very great strengths is that every single scene can
be traced back to that which binds Jack and Ennis. And in
directing with such singular focus, Lee minimizes the
titillation factor and raises the stakes for the audience’s
involvement in the story’s ultimate tragedy. And when that
happens, when Ennis goes to Jack’s parents’ desolate and
windswept farm, the weeping commences throughout the theatre,
accented by Gustavo Santaolalla‘s haunting and plaintive theme
song which both starts and ends the film.
It’s been a long time coming,
but at last, we have a Hollywood love story we can call our own.
|
